Sichuan was virtually in the exact centre of the Qing map, but Qing emperors repeatedly described it as a frontier, where economic and military policies determined the fate of the empire. In this book, Yingcong Dai explores some fundamental elements of Qing rule in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. She begins her story with the Qing conquest of southern China and the war against Wu Sangui, when the conquerors first understood the critical placement of Sichuan as a trade conduit to Tibet and Yunnan; within a few decades, the empire expanded its appreciation of Sichuan as a military staging area for the campaigns against Galdan. For the Kangxi court the province also constituted a sort of economic policy laboratory, as the state learned how to entice farmers to recolonize lands devastated in the late Ming rebellions. As in many other areas of the empire, the Sichuan economy had substantially revived by the end of the 17th century, but the Qing redevelopment policies of low taxation and substantial grants from the central government continued. In the Yongzheng period, Shaanxi and Sichuan – both essential staging areas for expeditions to Dzungaria, Turkestan and Tibet – came under a single governor-generalship, which took on an increasingly frank military character. This occurred in combination with Sichuan's development, beginning in the Kangxi period, as a major exporter of grain to other provinces. These two phenomena – extravagant rice production and strategic centrality – would control Sichuan's history for the Qing period.

Kangxi and Yongzheng era edicts frequently commented on the tendency of eastern provinces, particularly Zhejiang and Jiangsu, to acquire their rice – both for consumption and for satisfying state demands for tribute – from provinces on their west such as Hunan and Hubei, and for those provinces in turn to acquire their rice from Sichuan. By the turn of the 18th century the province's productivity kept its local market prices low, feeding both the armies who were extending Qing rule to the west, and the farmers of the east who had turned their former grain fields to more commercial uses. Until the Yongzheng period, the vigorous traffic in rice between Sichuan and the Jiangnan region was largely unsupervised and untaxed. From that point, the state began to raise substantial revenue in duties on Sichuan rice exports, but was hesitant to interfere with the province's remarkable productivity or its active trafficking of grain to the eastern provinces. In the 1770s, rising Qing military intervention in Sichuan, in Tibet and in Nepal led to direct central control over distribution of Sichuan's grain, causing the provincial market to decline and prices to respond more to government military demands than to local supply. The resulting economic tension, in combination with cultural friction and pressures from migrants, contributed to the outbreak of rebellions on the scale of the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796 to 1804, which crippled the Qing treasury and essentially ended the empire's hopes of further expansion.

In Dai's narrative, persisting low taxation was associated with the increasing military importance of Sichuan. The exact reasons for this are not stated, but the story Dai tells suggests how this worked. One of the more remarkable aspects of the book is the intermittent narration of the Yue family, originally from Gansu, but resettled in Sichuan as part of the Kangxi campaigns to establish hegemony in Tibet. Before the end of the Kangxi period, the Yues were well ensconced in Sichuan as landowners, military commanders, governors, and governors-general of Shaanxi and Sichuan. A scion of the lineage, Yue Zhongqi, extended the political reach to Zhejiang (where he was governor at the time of the Zeng Jing inquisition), and his own sons were appointed to civil and military governorships at young ages. The Yongzheng emperor eventually blamed Yue Zhongqi for the empire's disastrously premature campaigns against the Zunghars. Nevertheless, the Yue network of land grabbing and war profiteering continued, interfering with the suppression of the Jinchuan rebellions and in many ways presaging the civil–military corruption networks later made immortal by Heshen and his colleagues. Along the way, an imperial habit of exempting Sichuan from the usual avoidance laws for officials while weakening laws and tax demands to permit the accretion of local power by military families apparently afforded the foundation for Sichuan's powerful combination of low taxes and heavy military grants in the 18th century. Dai's vivid study of Sichuan allows us to see in some detail the ways in which Qing expansion into Dzungharia and Tibet profoundly militarized the economies and the political elites of Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi, while nurturing the intertwining of mobilization and corruption that made the empire as incapable of containing rebellion in the heartland as it was of further extending its conquests at the borders.