Introduction
John Richards' The Unending Frontier is a magisterial survey of the formation of a globally connected society in the early modern age.Footnote 1 For Richards, the main forces creating a global society were ‘a critical conjuncture between two developments: the expansive dynamism of European early modern capitalist societies, and the shared evolutionary progress in human organization that appears to have reached a critical threshold across Eurasia, if not the entire world’.Footnote 2 These two forces—markets and states—drove the increasingly intensive exploitation of natural resources around the globe, uniting continents, empires and traders in a tighter network of trade and administration. It is a brilliant synthesis of environmental and political history, which will shape all future work on this period.
For Richards, frontiers are sites of penetration by outsiders seeking control over borders and productive natural resources. A relentless process of warfare, consolidation, investment and exploitation of nature leads over the long run to heavy resource usage, and often exhaustion, driving the conquerors to push farther into the hinterlands in search of further gains. Native peoples of the frontier borderlands, for the most part, are merely victims of the much more powerful organised states and trading companies around them.
Although the nineteenth century is not the subject of this book, and the North American continent appears only in discussion of the fur trade, the ghost of Frederick J. Turner still hovers over Richards' work. It is now not a uniquely American story, but a global one, and it begins three centuries earlier. Still, the story of penetration of empty or underutilised lands and their increasingly intensive exploitation resonates with Turner's original account.
Although Richards would not use Turner's crude terms of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, he does argue that ‘when pioneer settlers brought new land under sedentary cultivation, they made landscapes more productive in economic terms’ and gives credit to the ‘consistent, intelligent land managers’ who brought this about. He does recognise that the domination of indigenous peoples, who were expelled, killed or enslaved by the new settlers, caused great suffering and cultural losses, but also notes that ‘we too-readily romanticize the relationship between such peoples and nature’. Some of his case studies examine the responses of indigenous peoples to the pressures of the new settlers, but he argues that we cannot interpret this contact as simply tragic.Footnote 3
From somewhat different approaches, other scholars have reached similar conclusions. Richards argues for the increasing capabilities of states and other organisations to bind their subjects together in material and political terms:
Across Eurasia and Africa (and perhaps the New World), human organizations were becoming larger, more complex, and more effective—especially states and quasi-state organizations. Having adapted and learned from continuing trial and error, rulers and elites in early modern states were more effective than their predecessors at providing basic public order within those territories they claimed. They mobilized and deployed larger armies and naval forces that were able to use the new gunpowder weaponry effectively. They did better than their predecessors at unifying fragmented polities under one system of authority. They did better at collecting taxes rather than tribute, which they assessed on some notion of public policy and relative productivity and with greater predictability and regularity. They were better than their predecessors at articulating ideologies and principles that legitimated their authority and appealed to their subjects.Footnote 4
This perspective is quite similar to that of Victor Lieberman, who has portrayed a general process of increasing administrative, economic and political integration across Eurasia over the eight centuries from 1000 to 1800 CE:
In sum, between c. 1450 and 1830 across mainland Southeast Asia, in what became the Russian empire, in those territories that cohered as France, and in the Japanese islands we find parallel tendencies towards the consolidation of fragmented political units, more efficient systems of extraction and control, and more uniform cultural expression.Footnote 5
Lieberman, however, does not see Western Europe as the unique stimulant of this integrative process. He also outlines a series of ‘administrative cycles’ of consolidation and decline during this period, with the seventeenth century marking a time of breakdown in many polities of Eurasia. Lieberman places less stress on exploitation of natural resources and more on inter-state competition and the conflict over centralisation of states between rulers and their landed elites. He also attends more closely to cultural integration, regarding the early modern trends as a broad process of integration in many realms, not simply intensified economic productivity.
Lieberman's approach is less Eurocentric and more contingent, but like Richards, he puts considerable emphasis on frontiers as the critical sites where these processes of integration played out. One important group promoting integration were marginal frontier elites, the dynamic military and political entrepreneurs emerging from borderlands to take over and reinvigorate encrusted traditional regimes. In Lieberman's scheme, the frontier strikes back as much as it is taken over. Its peoples are active participants in the process, not simple victims.
These two works offer complementary perspectives for viewing frontier expansion as a key element in early modern world history. Lieberman focuses on the formation and coordination of centralising states, while Richards focuses on the ecological processes driven by state formation on the frontiers. Lieberman allows for greater interaction between periphery and centre, while Richards puts more stress on the transformation of natural resources into productive resources for states and capitalists than on the internal political dynamics of the expanding states. Lieberman is more aware of the vulnerability of states to internal factionalism, external conquest, fiscal weakness and loss of legitimacy, while Richards puts more weight on the long-term material impact of war and commerce. Lieberman allows for fluctuations, irregularities and the simultaneous production of cultural difference and similarity, while Richards describes a nearly inevitable homogenising process, turning less productive borderlands into settled fields.
Because of the size of the Chinese empire, which grew from 150 to 300 million people in this period, and its dramatic territorial expansion, nearly tripling its size, we might expect imperial China to feature strongly in any account of frontier development in the early modern age. In both studies, however, China plays a somewhat secondary role. Lieberman does not examine the empire at all, although he promises to devote some attention to China in the second volume of his work.Footnote 6 Richards does have two brief chapters on China, but European expansion dominates the book. This neglect suggests that scholars of China need to pay more systematic attention to frontier development, so that Chinese perspectives can be included more fully in comparative world historical analysis.
I would also suggest, however, that neither study gives enough attention to the residents of the frontier themselves. These frontiers were not empty lands, and those who inhabited the region before the arrival of state-supported settlers shaped the evolution of land use there. It is not really accurate to call them ‘indigenous peoples’, since many of the residents were themselves immigrants or conquerors who arrived before the next wave of pioneer settlers. But from the viewpoint of the Han peasantry who intruded into the new borders, the earlier settlers were ‘natives’, ‘aborigines’ or ‘barbarians’. From their own point of view, the local peoples saw themselves as natives whose homelands faced threats from outside. In order to deepen our understanding of an important world historical process, we need to examine more closely how these peoples formed their collective identities while interacting with the expanding states. Recent comparative studies of European empires have begun to stress the interactions in both directions between metropolitan cores and frontier peripheries. Processes in frontier regions or imperial peripheries shaped politics at the centre just as much as the other way around.Footnote 7
Historians of China have recently produced an abundant amount of scholarship on the frontier regions of the Qing empire (1636–1911).Footnote 8 These studies cover a variety of regions and time periods, but nearly all of them address the central issues discussed above: the impact of imperial expansion on frontier regions, formation of collective identities on the peripheries, the role of trade, war and religion in shaping border definitions, and how these processes shaped the late imperial Chinese state. Many of these historians devote a great deal of attention to ethnicity, since so many of the peoples of the frontiers embraced cultural traditions quite different from the Han culture of the core. They agree, however, that the current PRC definition of 56 ethnic groups, or nationalities [minzu], is utterly inadequate to capture the contested, contingent formation of ethnic consciousness on frontiers.
Other historians pursuing the comparative history of empires have also invoked the frontier as a crucial site of imperial formation, and a number of recent works have included serious discussion of China along with other empires.Footnote 9 I will draw on these studies to give a few examples of what new insights we can gather by looking at these works comparatively.
The central questions I have in mind are: How do ecologies of production shape the character of peoples in border regions? How do states expanding into border regions classify the peoples they encounter, and how do these collective categories affect frontier policy? How do the residents of the frontier construct their own collective identities, and how do their conceptions of themselves interact with those of the settlers and officials? Can we adopt the working hypothesis that the sharper the distinction of productive ecologies between the frontier and the core settlers, the more distinct the lines which frontier residents and pioneers draw between each other? A long tradition of discourse on frontier issues from the classical texts of the first millennium BCE through the Qing dynasty indicates how rulers, officials and settlers in imperial China confronted these questions.
The Qing rulers sponsored a large corpus of works in Manchu, Chinese, and other languages to describe the frontier territories which they conquered. These include memorials from officials to the emperor, essays on frontier policy, ethnographic albums portraying the customs of frontier people, maps and drawings, travelers' reports, literature, poetry, and art. I will draw on only a few examples to illustrate some of the principal sites and issues of frontier control from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Nature and Nurture in Classical Chinese Thought
How is human character linked to location? The Chinese classics gave conflicting answers to this question. An essential principle of the Confucian moral tradition is that all humans are endowed with equal potential from birth. They can all develop their positive qualities into genuine ethical understanding if they put effort into study and self-reflection on what is required to become a junzi [Confucian gentleman, or sage]. This universal humanist principle excludes no one from sagehood.
On the other hand, classical writers agreed that environments strongly influence human character. Mencius used the metaphor of a deforested mountain to illustrate how human impulses towards the good can be defeated by hostile surroundings, just as grass cannot grow sustainably on a mountain which is overgrazed and underwatered. Daoists more explicitly connected true understanding of the moral Way [dao] to the avoidance of the corrupting influences of state offices, cities and wealth. The ideal state described in the classic text Daodejing was a small, isolated village:
Though they may gaze across at a neighboring state,
and hear the sounds of its dogs and chickens,
The people will never travel back and forth,
till they die of old age.Footnote 10
Other writers, like Legalists, believed that active transformation of nature, through large public works, for example, had positive effects on human character. By shaping nature to suit their own goals, humans also shaped themselves to fit into nature. Harmonising both the human and natural orders required active transformation on both ends.
In more practical terms, the incessant military competition of the Warring States period of the fifth to third centuries BCE led to intensive demands on natural resources, and the exhaustion of many of them. Even in time of peace, few Chinese were friends of forests, or of elephants. Chinese settlement proceeded in inverse relationship to the survival of wild animal habitats. The diligent local official, dedicated to improving the welfare of his people, should do his best to ‘exhaust the resources of the earth’ [jin dili].Footnote 11
What about peoples who were not so productive? Those who did not live on the intensively cultivated agrarian lands of the Han core found a different form of production more suitable. They might be nomads living off animals in the grasslands, mountain peoples practicing swidden agriculture, or fishermen and hunters in forest and maritime environments. The core Chinese settlers generally called these peoples ‘barbarians’ and considered them to be at the margins of the civilised realm. The ancient states pushed outward into these regions in order to fortify themselves against their rivals, and the unified empires continued the process. In China, state-promoted settlement, land clearance, population growth, suppression of frontier peoples and extension of control through military and commercial means go back to the first millennium BCE.
Two general modes of thinking about frontier peoples contended with each other over the centuries of the imperial era. The idea of ‘transformation’ [hua] allowed that all peoples could become ‘civilised’ in Chinese terms, if they adopted central elements of the orthodox social and ritual practice. These included study of the classical texts, observation of rituals to honour ancestors, practicing settled agriculture and rural textile production, proper segregation and subordination of women, etc. This was usually the dominant view of officials and policymakers. The opposing view held that certain peoples, because of their location and environment, must be irrevocably cast out of the realm of civilisation. They could not be transformed; the only options for the imperial state were coexistence or forcible extermination. This perspective, which repeatedly compared nomadic peoples to birds and beasts, assigned them to the natural order and not the human one. The most disturbing aspect of nomadic practice was their mobility. Since they lived off grasslands, they did not settle down; therefore, they could not be counted, taxed or drafted for military and public works.
Following the terminology of George Frederickson, we may distinguish these opposing perspectives as ‘culturalism’ and ‘racialism’.Footnote 12 Frederickson argues that European imperialists used similar stereotypical descriptions both of the peoples they conquered and of Jews within Europe. Both perspectives saw the conquered peoples as inferior, but culturalists allowed for the possibility of raising up subject peoples through education, religious conversion and economic development, while racialists rejected these possibilities. Jonathan Lipman uses similar terminology to describe Qing attitudes towards Chinese Muslims.Footnote 13 I find it useful to apply this distinction more broadly towards Chinese ruling elite perceptions of peoples on the frontier.
Transformationalists, or culturalists, believed that it was possible to induce mobile peoples to become more settled, and thereby register them and incorporate them into the imperial realm. Cultural change could trump natural determinism. Racialists argued that the environment irrevocably stamped the ‘essential character’ [xing] of people, and no cultural or political measures could change them. A Ming writer describing Mongols who raided along the northwest frontier explicitly invoked these naturalist tropes. He compared the campaign to defend the Ordos frontier to the legendary statesman Yu's controlling of the flood waters:
I compare it [defense] to building a dike to stop flood waters. If one morning the dike breaks, a huge flood cannot be stopped. If we recover the Ordos by brandishing our military might, drive out the exterior cause of calamity, and create a barrier along the Yellow River . . ., the enemy's courage will be shattered, their wolfish glances will turn into a timid hush, and they will not dare to plunder for several hundred years. It will be like Great Yu controlling the flood using the sea as a ditch so that the water returns to its proper place, and does not flood . . . it will be an achievement that Han and Tang cannot equal.Footnote 14
Thus, he viewed Mongols as simply forces of nature, bestial or physical.
Although both streams of thought coexisted through many dynasties, broadly speaking, dynasties ruled by Han-dominant elites, especially in periods of division, were most likely to embrace racialist perspectives. Dynasties ruled by conquest elites from Central Eurasia, generally expansive and unifying military forces, tended to embrace culturalism. The Song [960–1280 CE] and Ming [1368–1644 CE] dynasties represent the racialist perspective most strongly, while the Yuan [1281–1368 CE] and Qing [1636–1911 CE] display greater culturalism. The Han dynasties [206 BCE–220 CE], in their policy debates over handling the Xiongnu nomadic confederation, display an interesting mix of the two. The Tang dynasty [618–906 CE], whose ruling elite was partly Han and partly Turkish, also embraced many of the culturalist perspectives of Central Eurasian conquerors.
Culturalism meant an effort to find common ground with alien peoples, so as to convince others that cooperation with the imperial centre could help join different peoples together in the interest of higher goals. Cultural policies looked for bridging mechanisms to create channels of communication, selecting shared elements of each culture. The culturalists took for granted that their own culture was more ‘civilized’, but they did not necessarily advocate complete assimilation of the inferior culture to their own. Extreme advocates of cultural transformation expected total assimilation in a distant future, but many policy makers were willing to accept the coexistence of distinct ethnic markers as long as bases for communication and peace were established. The search for bridging elements could include specific religious traditions, such as the Buddhist beliefs of Han, Manchus, Mongols and Tibetans, a general appeal to universal desires for peace and prosperity, or efforts to trace common genealogies of distinct peoples. The Manchus often appealed to Mongols by claiming that they belonged to the same ‘family’, and Hakkas, a distinct sub-ethnic group of the Han Chinese, liked to trace their ancestry to Tang dynasty elites.
Chinese racialism drew sharp distinctions between peoples, and almost always assumed a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Unlike much modern Western racism, however, these distinctions did not have to be based on skin colour or physiognomy, and did not invoke genetic inferiority or pretensions to science. This racialist perspective had more environmental than genetic foundations, although separate genealogies could sometimes appear. Food, clothing, landscape, climate, marriage customs, mobility and other ways of life all created sharply distinct ‘folkways’ in this view.
The best known example of explicit racialist ideology is the seventeenth century writer Wang Fuzhi [1619–1692], who declared, ‘Barbarians and Chinese are born in different places, which are endowed with different atmospheres. Since the atmospheres are different, their habits must be different. Since their habits are different, their thinking and behavior must be different’.Footnote 15
Wang was loyal to the fallen Ming dynasty and firmly rejected the legitimacy of the conquering Manchu elite. His writings were suppressed under Manchu rule, but were revived in the late nineteenth century in order to energise anti-Manchu nationalist revolutionaries. Wang's ideas, however, survived as a simmering counter-ideology to the orthodox views of the Qing rulers.
In the early eighteenth century, the Yongzheng emperor [r. 1723–1735] and an obscure scholar named Zeng Jing debated this question publicly.Footnote 16 Zeng Jing, a low-level degree holder from Hunan, had concluded that the Manchus had no legitimate right to rule China, because they came from a different territory and different cultural heritage. In his view, only Han rulers from the central plains or the south could rule the empire; other peoples were ‘barbarians’ who could never adapt to the civilised ways of the interior. Zeng Jing drew inspiration for his ideas from writers of the late Ming dynasty like Wang Fuzhi who had refused to serve the Manchus after the conquest. He wrote a letter to a leading Han general, proposing that the general lead an uprising to throw out the Manchu usurpers.
The general immediately revealed the proposed plot to the emperor and Qing officials rounded up Zeng Jing and his very small number of disciples. There was never a serious military threat to the empire, or even a threat of disorder. Yet, the emperor was so disturbed by this proposal that he had Zeng Jing interrogated severely, and under torture forced him to confess his errors. The emperor also wrote his own lengthy refutation of Zeng and insisted that it be made required reading in all the empire's schools.
Why was the emperor so disturbed? By furiously suppressing Zeng and by publicising his refutation, the emperor in effect put Zeng's ideas on a par with his own. He clearly feared that Zeng's conception of the Manchus as illegitimate might be more widely shared among the Han literati class. Zeng drew on elements of the classical tradition to build his argument that nature determined character. He rejected the idea of transformation, arguing that Manchus could not change their ways. Yongzheng, by contrast, did not base his claim to rule on the proposition that Manchus had become identical to the Han. He too, agreed that the two peoples were distinct. But the Manchus had ‘wiped out the shame’ of the Ming dynasty, which had failed to keep internal order. The Manchus had brought peace and prosperity, which benefited both peoples. The only people who needed to be ‘transformed’, in the emperor's view, were those diehard adherents of the vanished Ming dynasty who stubbornly refused to accept Manchu legitimacy. He devoted the massive resources of his bureaucratic regime to stamping out any traces of cultural resistance. Some scholars attribute this overkill to Yongzheng's paranoid character, but he may have had real reasons to fear subterranean resistance. There were indications of rumours and placards in some southern Chinese cities advocating open resistance to the Manchus, and the rulers could never be certain that Han literati entirely accepted them. Yongzheng purged some of his most loyal Han generals, out of fear that their successes might overshadow his power, or become too appealing to the Han subjects.
The Manchus, as a minority ruling elite, had strong incentives to reject racialist ideas of rule, but they also rejected complete assimilation with the Han. They selectively adopted certain Han cultural features, but maintained their separateness through religious ceremonies, the banner system and compulsory exercises in horsemanship and military drill.Footnote 17 They succeeded in preserving their difference through the end of the dynasty and even up to the present. Over time, the Manchu homeland became a key element in defining Manchu identity, even though most Manchus never lived there. The association of people with a territory and distinct landscape was deliberately strengthened during the Qing as a mechanism of preserving Manchu power. At the same time, the Manchus appealed to the common values shared with the Han to ensure that their rule would be accepted by the majority. Qing rule depended on preserving a delicate balance between conceptions of difference rooted in territory and folkways, and appeals to similarity based on universal values. The frontier origins of the Manchus were the underlying conditions that impelled them to develop this complex ideology of rule.
The View from Beyond the Frontier
What did those on the other side of the imperial boundary think? Although most of our sources give only the imperial Chinese point of view, sometimes we can detect analogous tensions among the frontier peoples themselves. Some regarded cultural transformation as genuinely possible, either as a threat or a positive opportunity. Others insisted on segregation and protection of the distinct cultures of their region. Often, however, those who believed in the possibility of transformation saw it as a threat. Their main concern was to ward off Chinese ‘soft power’. Through the window of Chinese writings about the Xiongnu nomadic confederation in the Han dynasty, we can see evidence of the ‘five baits’ used by the Han empire to weaken the resistance of the Xiongnu: ‘elaborate clothes and carriages to corrupt their eyes; fine food to corrupt their mouths; music to corrupt their ears; lofty buildings, granaries, and slaves to corrupt their stomachs; gifts and favors for [those] who surrendered’.Footnote 18
A Chinese advisor to the Xiongnu warned them against this seductive strategy:
The strength of the Xiongnu lies in the very fact that their food and clothing are different from those of the Chinese, and they are therefore not dependent on the Han for anything. Now the Shanyu [Xiongnu chieftain] has this fondness for Chinese things and is trying to change the Xiongnu customs. Thus, although the Han sends not more than a fifth of its goods here, it will in the end succeed in winning over the whole Xiongnu nation. From now on, when you get any of the Han silks, put them on and try riding your horses through brush and brambles! In no time your robes and leggings will be torn to shreds and everyone will see that silks are no match for the utility and excellence of felt and leather garments. Likewise when you get any of the Han foodstuffs, throw them away so that people can see that they are not as practical or tasty as milk and kumiss!Footnote 19.
In the eighth century CE, in the native language of the steppe, the Orkhon inscriptions in ancient Turkish blamed the disintegration of the Türk empire on seduction by Chinese ways.
Bilgä khaghan warned his people:
They [the Chinese] give [us] gold, silver, and silk in abundance. The words of the Chinese people have always been sweet and the materials of the Chinese people have always been soft. Deceiving by means of their sweet words and soft materials the Chinese are said to cause remote peoples to come close in this manner. . . . Having been taken in by their sweet words and soft materials, you Turkish people were killed in great numbers. O Turkish people, you will die [if you settle close to the Chinese in the south]. . . If you stay in the land of Ötükän and send caravans from there you will have no trouble. If you stay in the Ötükän mountains you will live forever dominating the tribes.Footnote 20
These writers did not actively embrace ‘Sinicisation’ or assimilation to the empire's demands, nor were they merely ‘nostalgic’ for vanished practices of the past. They saw Chinese imperial efforts at cultural change as a present, clear danger to their autonomy as people and as a state.
When conquest dynasties took control of core Han territory, similar debates broke out about how to preserve their own cultural core while also accommodating large numbers of Han Chinese. Often, the solution was to create two or more separate administrations for each region, distinct in institutional structure, personnel and policies. The Liao, Jin and Yuan dynasties established these types of dual administrations, as did the Qing in its own frontier regions, including the Manchu homeland.
But other social processes beyond administrative control always threatened to undermine policies of segregation. Migration of Han settlers to frontier regions caused great ambivalence. In the view of proponents of migration, the migrants could raise the productivity of cleared lands and increase the proportion of settled farmers, thereby raising the level of ‘civilisation’ on the frontier. Opponents argued that mixing two distinct populations inevitably generated conflict, and that segregation was the way to ensure peace. In addition, these contrasting perspectives did not only apply to peoples on the ‘interior’ of the empire, or to nomads on the steppes. All the peoples and states on imperial China's borders constantly interacted with Han culture and took a variety of stances towards it. In this sense, Mongols, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese and Southeast Asian polities all faced similar issues.
How were these ethnic perspectives connected to environmental conditions? I would propose that, in general, the more radical the differences between ecologies of production of two peoples, the sharper the ethnic distinctions and the sharper the consciousness of difference. On the other hand, in borderlands between two sharply distinct ecologies, mixed settlement and cooperation often flourished. Settled Han peasants in the core and their rulers saw very little in common with the most mobile nomads of the Central Eurasian steppes. Manchus and Han pioneers on the frontiers, however, shared certain features with their neighbours, like mobility and the use of horses, making greater cultural communication possible. Similarly, in the southwest, from the Chinese perspective, the ‘raw’ aborigines were too mobile and primitive to be controlled or even educated, while the ‘cooked’ peoples who learned Chinese, settled down, and lived near to Han settlers could be transformed into civilised humans.Footnote 21
But environments did not totally determine cultural change. Every empire could accommodate radically different ecologies and cultures. The accidents of war and expansion brought diverse peoples under one imperial gaze. Because imperial borders are not fixed by ethnic criteria, empires by their nature must be set up to accommodate and manage difference. As Charles Maier notes, ‘Imperial and national frontiers—even if of similar outward type—usually enclose different processes of governance and institutional structuration within their respective territories. The nation-state will strive for a homogeneous territory . . . Because of their size, and their assumption of power over old states and communities, empires possess a far less administratively uniform territory’.Footnote 22
On the other hand, some regimes with the most similar production systems to the settled Han core had the most success in fighting off Han domination. The Vietnamese of the Red River valley, whose agriculture and social customs most resembled those of south China, had the greatest success in driving out Chinese rule in the tenth century and defeating Chinese invasions ever after. We need to look at particular political and military encounters in order to clarify the connections between frontier environments and ethnic interaction.
The three case studies that follow look at different types of frontier interactions leading to different categorisations of frontier peoples by the center and different policies toward migration, settlement, and the use of force.
Manchus and Mongols in the Seventeenth Century
Manchus and Mongols played complementary roles in constructing their collective identities in the early seventeenth century. The Manchus did not exist as a single people until the military unifier Nurhaci named them in 1635. The term ‘Mongol’ also seldom referred to a single unified population. Various tribes, each with their own lineages and territorial attachments, moved across the grasslands and forests of Central Eurasia, interacting with the Han Chinese to the south. Most of those later to be called Manchus were forest dwellers, living off fishing, hunting and trade in forest goods, while some settled in river valleys and practiced agriculture. Nurhaci [1559–1626], the founder of the Manchu state, had obtained licenses to trade with Ming garrisons on the frontier, and he used the resources gained through trade to strengthen his position beyond the Great Wall. Nurhaci's conquests of his neighbours mainly kept him in the forest zone. His successor, Hong Taiji [1592–1643], expanded the state southward into the settled regions of Liaodong, bringing under his sway Han settlers escaping Ming taxation, runaway soldiers, traders, criminals and others. These ‘transfrontiersmen’ joined with the growing Manchu state and the newly established banner system, a combined military and administrative institution including many ethnic groups, gave them a place within it. From its origins, the Manchu state spanned several ecological zones and incorporated many different cultural groups. Some Mongols also joined the Manchus in the early period, but others remained apart. Some, like the Chahar Mongols, resisted Manchu rule, but lost to them in battle. Others joined when they observed the growing military strength of the new state.
The Mongols, spread over a vast area, did not share a common spoken language or religion. Most were nomads, but some had begun to settle down, and Buddhist Mongols had established fixed monasteries since the late sixteenth century. The primary common allegiance of Mongols was to the heritage of Chinggis Khan. To obtain legitimacy as supreme Khan of the Mongols, one had to claim descent from Chinggis Khan's clan, the Borjigid, and demonstrate superior military leadership. During the Ming dynasty, no Mongol could both claim to be Chinggis' descendant and win enough battles to unify all the Mongols. Several non-Chinggisids did create powerful confederations, but they lasted only for a short period of time.
The Manchu rulers of the Qing were well aware of these divisions and used them effectively to keep the Mongols divided. They won over early Mongol adherents and incorporated them into the earliest banner units. The Khalkha Mongols of eastern Mongolia came over to the Manchu side in 1691, after prolonged internecine warfare and invasion by the Oirat leader Galdan from the West. The Oirat Mongols, the federation farthest west, fought against Qing expansion tenaciously under leadership by the Zunghar leaders, but finally were subdued in 1760.
The appeal of the Kangxi emperor [r. 1662–1722] to the Zunghar leader Galdan [r. 1671–1697] illustrates how the Qing appealed to universal ideals to consolidate its rule over the Mongols. By claiming common interests with the Dalai Lama as a patron of Buddhism, the Qing emperor attempted to bridge cultural divisions between the core of China and the steppe, stressing the benefits of peaceful relations. The Qing emperor asserted his ability to embrace multiple peoples under a single benevolent administration, while respecting the distinctive practices of each of his subjects. He gave the Mongols and other ‘barbarians’ credit for having comparable moral values, but also offered them a moral choice: they could accept submission to the Qing comprehensive imperial project, or else face extermination. The Kangxi emperor did not conceal his military power or willingness to use it if necessary. His embrace of culturalism combined the enticing benefits of peace, prosperity and mutual respect, but reserved the right to use the sword if these were rejected. When Galdan rejected the Kangxi emperor's tempting offer, the emperor conducted personal military campaigns designed to literally ‘pull up the roots’ of his regime.Footnote 23
The Kangxi emperor, however, failed to eradicate the Zunghar state. It took 60 more years before his grandson, the Qianlong emperor [r. 1736–1795] could extend Qing military rule over all of Zungharia, eliminating the Zunghar state and people. The Qianlong emperor took advantage of divisions among the Zunghars over succession to leadership. He intervened on the side of prince Amursana, who called in Qing troops to support his campaign against his rival. After Amursana's victory, the emperor made it clear that Amursana would not have sole power, as he expected, but share it with others. Amursana rebelled against the Qing, but lost to the final Qing campaigns in 1760.
Qianlong's victory made possible more intensive settlement of the oases of Xinjiang and the conversion of grasslands to cultivated fields. The Qing state actively promoted transformation of the northwest territories in order to tie them more closely to the interior. The emperor also sponsored large-scale scholarly projects to map the region, classify its peoples and write its definitive history. The emperor, in his preface to the history of his military campaigns, gave the Zunghars a prominent role in the ‘opening’ of Xinjiang. He recognised their long-term presence, but attributed their loss to the Qing to abandonment by Heaven. He defined them as a separate group of nomads, carefully classifying them into their subordinate units. By systematising the very confusing history of the Zunghar state, the Qianlong emperor granted them a distinctive character based on their domination of the grasslands of the west. Now the Qing, with Heaven's aid, had brought peace to the region, bringing prosperity to all its peoples. (The fact of deliberate extermination of many Zunghar warriors by Qing armies was omitted in this account.)
In the eighteenth century, Qing writers recognised that the particular landscape of Xinjiang (literally, the ‘New Borderland’) created a distinct kind of people. Some even thought that Han emigrants to the region could benefit from the austere conditions of life there, and that the frontier would reinvigorate the martial spirit of the Han people. Xinjiang also became a land of temporary exile for many officials convicted of crimes. Some literati sent to the region found the experience bracing. Far from seeing a wasteland, they portrayed the cities of Xinjiang as vibrant communities with their own particular songs, customs and ancient heritage. Xinjiang was neither just like the interior, nor was it empty. It was another special component of the differentiated space that comprised the sprawling Qing empire.
Taiwan: Natives and Migrants
Taiwan, another region newly conquered by the Qing in the seventeenth century, had a very different ecology. Before the Qing arrival, the inhabitants of Taiwan were mainly peoples with Polynesian or Southeast Asian connections, practicing swidden agriculture and deer hunting in the deep tropical forests. Dutch colonial rule of the early seventeenth century promoted agricultural cultivation along flatter lands in the southern part of the island. The Zheng regime of 1661–1683 further stimulated land clearance. Qing settlement began from a baseline that already included aboriginal peoples, incipient agricultural development and colonial domination. All three interacted over the next two centuries of Qing rule.Footnote 24
The writings of Lan Dingyuan [1680–1733], an official active in the promotion of the colonisation of Taiwan, indicate how the native population participated in Qing penetration. Lan, like many Qing officials, regarded the aboriginal population as endemically warlike. The young men engaged in incessant feuds with other tribes, leaving them incapable of resisting the organised Qing forces. But migrants from mainland China also proved to be turbulent. They came from different regions of China, and often instigated feuds against each other for control of land, water and other resources. The settlers also resisted official efforts to tax them and mobilise their labour for public works. In 1721, the duck breeder Zhu Yigui, an immigrant from Fujian province, raised a rebellion against particularly abusive official demands. He attacked official headquarters and defeated the small Qing forces in southern Taiwan. Zhu also rallied anti-Manchu support by claiming to be a descendant of the Ming royal family, since he had the same surname. As the revolt spread more widely, panicked officials abandoned the capital of southern Taiwan in Tainan. Within two weeks, Qing control of nearly all the island had collapsed.
Lan joined the campaign to suppress Zhu's rebellion. The Qing leaders enrolled aboriginal troops on their side against Zhu's forces, offering the natives rewards of 3 taels for every rebel killed, and 5 taels for every rebel leader. This incentive led the native troops to attack Han settlers indiscriminately, burning whole villages and slaughtering large populations. Lan concluded from this bungled policy that natives were by nature ‘greedy, wild, and insatiable’. Regular Qing forces soon suppressed the rebellion and brought the native forces under control, but Lan blamed the rebellion on restrictions of Han immigration to the island. He aggressively advocated Han settlement in order to tame the aboriginal menace. Until this time, Qing officials had tried to restrict migration to the island, both to prevent feuds among the Chinese and to protect the aboriginal population, but Lan pushed hard for an assimilationist policy. Lan took the vision of cultural transformation to its extreme: large-scale Han immigration to the island and enforced settlement of aborigines would make them give up violence and tribal hunting and adapt to settled Han ways. His aggressive views were not typical of most Qing officials. His arguments for increased immigration and aboriginal assimilation were rejected and the court continued to impose restraints on immigration.Footnote 25
Although the emperors repeatedly reversed policies on immigration, over the long-term, a wave of Han settlers flowed there in defiance of imperial prohibitions. The aborigines who adapted to Han ways still proved helpful to Qing officials in putting down other rebellions by Han settlers in the late eighteenth century. Those who rejected the new settlers fled to more distant mountainous regions in order to continue slash-and-burn agriculture and hunting as means of subsistence.
In sum, on this frontier, some of the native inhabitants actively assisted Qing settlement, just as the cooperative Mongols had aided Manchu expansion in the northwest. Even though the ecologies of production differed radically at the outset, those aborigines who took up settled agriculture found common cause with Qing officials who enforced stable conditions of production, like the Mongols who praised the peace brought by Qing rule. Unlike Mongolia, however, the largest threat to social order came not from the ‘wild’ natives, but from groups of Chinese settlers themselves. Perhaps, because the old ways of swidden agriculture and deer hunting offered only limited opportunities on the narrow island in the face of increasing Han settlement, holding out against Qing control held less promise for aboriginal Taiwanese than for Mongols. Mongols still had vast spaces of grasslands to retreat to, and under Qing rule, they could still continue a constricted nomadic way of life. Aborigines had to convert totally to settled agriculture in order to convince Qing officials that they had become ‘civilised’. Radical colonialists like Lan Dingyuan wrote off the entire aboriginal population as irredeemably aggressive, but more balanced officials used the converted aborigines to control unruly Han settlers. The mixed population on this frontier offered several opportunities for balancing different ethnic forces against each other.
From Miao to ‘Miao’ in Southwest China
In Taiwan, Qing officials could identify loyal aboriginal populations and use them against troublesome Han migrants. On the southwest frontier, it was more difficult to define exactly who the loyal populations were.Footnote 26 The Qing experience with ‘Miao’ peoples in western Hunan and Guizhou province illustrates this concern. The term ‘Miao’ embraced a variety of local populations who lived in mountainous regions on the peripheries of several provinces of south China. Although the Ming dynasty had placed garrisons in part of the region, significant control and penetration by Han migrants only came in the eighteenth century. Qing officials recognised that this region, even though part of the regular provincial administration, was different from the interior [neidi], and regularly referred to it as the ‘Miao borderland’ [Miaojiang]. As in Taiwan, they tended to blame disorder in the region on Han migrants who disturbed the peaceful activities of the innocent Miao, even using the term ‘Han traitors’ [Hanjian] to describe migrants who created disturbances. The culturalists argued for allowing migration, while promoting policies to protect Miao land rights and also accustom them to Han ways. Education, the adoption of Han dress, wearing of the queue and other external signs of acculturation would, in their view, reduce differences between the two populations and lead to peace. Pessimists, with a more racialist view, argued for keeping the populations distinct in order to prevent contamination of one by the other. They feared that the Han miscreants would provide hostile Miao with weapons and techniques of resistance to Qing rule, while also mistreating the Miao and creating resentment.
The Yongzheng emperor had promoted active migration in the 1720s, but the Qianlong emperor reversed this policy, arguing that the Miao needed to be left in peace. Efforts at quarantining the Miao, however, failed here as in Taiwan because of demographic pressures and the penetration of Han trade networks into the region. In the 1760s, rival Miao groups called in Qing troops to settle their feuds, but the Qing military officials rejected the orders to settle disputes according to Miao custom. Instead, they carried out brutal repression of all Miao, stimulating sharp resentments which burst out in a major revolt in 1795, led by Miao who spoke Chinese. Qing officials had radically misjudged the loyalty of the semi-acculturated Miao. As Donald Sutton notes:
Eighteenth-century writings . . . did not distinguish between acculturation and assimilation. It was assumed that the hearts and minds of the Miao had been (or were being) won over, and that talking and behaving like Chinese and receiving minimal Confucian education would make them loyal Qing subjects. But bilingualism in the three subprefectures [in western Hunan]. . . was forming and fortifying political identity, not weakening it. The fact that Miao of all three subprefectures and Songtao rose up almost in a body in 1795 suggests that their sense of common identity had been crystallized by the experiences of the preceding decades.Footnote 27
Brutal repression put down the Miao rebels of Hunan after many years of military campaigning from 1795 to 1806, but in the mid-nineteenth century, revolts broke out in neighbouring Guizhou. This rebellion lasted from 20 years, from 1854–1873, and it, too, required many years of devastating, and expensive, military campaigns. In this rebellion, however, the Miao themselves played only a subordinate role. As Robert Jenks argues: ‘Many more Han than Miao were involved on the rebel side, despite the misleading name—to wit, “Miao” rebellion—that has been applied to this period of turmoil’.Footnote 28 The rebels included other hill peoples, Han militia groups, followers of sectarian religions, Muslims, martial arts experts, peasants resisting tax exactions, along with Miao and others protesting Han immigration to the province. Robert Jenks' excellent study gives a detailed narrative of the multiple revolts and military campaigns of this period. I will only comment that misperceptions by Qing officials of the ethnic composition of the province aggravated the problem of restoring order just as it had in eighteenth-century Hunan. By mischaracterising the rebels as ‘Miao’ and by assuming that all Miao were stupid, aggressive and violent, the officials and military men simply polarised the population, making it impossible to find local allies. The inability to distinguish ethnic and religious loyalties on this very mixed frontier prolonged the control effort, and led to much merciless massacre and destruction. Some local officials recognised the complexity of the region, but their views did not carry the day.
It seems that the Manchus of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who cleverly manipulated Mongols of the northwest and found local allies in Taiwan, lost their touch in the Miao borderlands in the nineteenth century. The development of a more racialist ideology of separation had begun in the mid-eighteenth century, for a number of reasons. As the Manchus themselves came to fear losing their collective identity among the vast sea of Han whom they ruled, they began to promote policies to preserve Manchu identity based on genealogical descent and the special features of the Manchu homeland. This sharper definition of the Manchus led to defining other peoples of the empire in more rigid ways. By the late eighteenth century, on many borderlands, severe ethnic discontent sharpened Manchu and Han repression, leading them to create polarised images of loyal subjects and vicious rebels. As they lost their ability to distinguish among different local populations on a number of frontiers, they lost the ability to recruit local allies.
In the mid-nineteenth century, rebellions broke out around the empire on a much larger scale. Although population pressure, immigration and trade disrupted all the frontier regions, intelligent local policies could have prevented friction and forestalled revolt. The mid-nineteenth century rebellions had many causes, but one of them was the inability of Qing frontier officials to gather enough information about the multiple ethnic groups in their jurisdiction to make possible nuanced policies. In order to maintain peace, Qing rulers needed ethnic categorisations attentive to the diverse environments of the empire's frontiers. When they lost the ability to make these distinctions, they lost one of the keys to their enduring dominion.
