This compact and highly readable book adds to the growing literature on China's environmental history in the early modern world. Focusing on Qing-era Manchuria and Mongolia in the period from 1760 to 1830, Schlesinger shows how China's Manchu conquerors in the imperial capital city of Beijing established new norms for style and tastes that spread among elite Chinese. The resulting demand for luxury products from beyond the Great Wall set in motion processes that led to the collecting, picking and hunting of wild things to be consumed – Schlesinger focuses on fresh water pearls and ginseng (chapter two), steppe mushrooms (chapter three) and furs (chapter four). In the process, wild populations collapsed and species nearly went extinct, a finding that echoes David A. Bello's recent work. Bringing impressive linguistic skills to his research, Schlesinger includes Manchu and Mongol sources, allowing him to construct a view from the empire's periphery not captured in Chinese sources alone.

The “wild things” from Manchuria and Mongolia did not start out as commodities but as tributes to the Qing state. Schlesinger devotes the first part of his case studies to the imperial institutions by which the Qing state incorporated the various peoples of the frontier into the empire and made the extraction of tribute possible. He provides fascinating insight into the ecology of the tributized species (who knew that mussels, for example, could live 100 years and that the females could produce hundreds of millions of eggs?), and the ways in which the local peoples organized themselves to meet Qing quotas. He documents and tells stories about how these interactions led to the decline in the numbers of these species, to the collapse of the tribute, to the ways the Qing state scrambled to make the administrative reforms it thought necessary to keep the tribute coming, and to the end of the “wild things” and the “pristine places” from which they came, despite Qing efforts to protect both.

In the process of confronting issues of where these things came from and the attempts to keep those places “pure,” Schlesinger considers that the Qing articulated concepts comparable to what Europeans came to call “nature.” This issue arises first in chapter two when Schlesinger adds the story of ginseng picking. Unlike mussels, steppe mushrooms and the fur-bearing sable, ginseng could be domesticated and farmed. Instead of seeing farmed ginseng as a rational response to wild ginseng shortages, the Qing state moved to halt production and destroy the farms. The Daoguang court opined that “Ginseng is a delicate product of a numinous land … [and] using the power of people to cultivate it is like forgery! The power of ginseng produced by the mountains is naturally vast… If one plants ginseng, then it will be without its power when used” (p. 87). That is an interesting idea, and may well problematize the European concept of species and of species extinction: are wild and domesticated specimens the same species?

This newfound Qing concern with “purity” informs “the mushroom crisis” (chapter three), when in the 1820s demand for the Mongolian steppe mushroom drew waves of undocumented Chinese across the border, devastating the environment, threatening the Mongol way of life, and creating headaches for local administrators. In response, the Qing state attempted to “purify” the disturbed Mongolian steppe to a presumably pristine condition by focusing on people as the problem, and expelling undocumented Chinese interlopers and punishing their Mongol collaborators – “there is no evidence that the state cared about plants, animals, and fungi in and of themselves” (p. 117).

In chapter four, “Nature in the land of fur,” sea otters and sable were “driven to the edge of extinction” (p. 132) in the early 19th century by a global demand that linked China, Russia, the north Pacific and North America in commercial and environmental ways. Using Mongol and Chinese sources, Schlesinger shines his light on what happened in a sparsely populated, but increasingly globally connected, part of north-western Mongolia bordering Russia. As a result of the sable tribute exacted from the region, not only the animals and environment were damaged, but the people too, despite the Qing effort to “purify” the borderland to protect the people, their products and their ways of life.

So what? The Qing imperial project in Manchuria, Mongolia and the northern borderland aimed at remaking both peoples and their environments – in contemporary discourse, identity and ecology intertwined. If mussels, ginseng, mushrooms and furs defined Manchurians, Mongols and Uriankhai, and those species disappeared as commodities consumed in urban markets, the Qing court's idealized version of these peoples was also endangered. Schlesinger ponders whether the ensuing discourse about “purity” implies a Qing invention of “nature” (pp. 169–170) and concludes that the Western obsession with “unspoiled nature” is a Eurocentric construct that should be reconsidered in light of Qing environmental history.