Strictly speaking, this is a book on cultural history with an interdisciplinary approach. The real thrust of the book lies in its unconventional source for the Qing administration: it is based mainly on Manchurian and Mongolian information unavailable in the Chinese language. This approach alone represents pathbreaking progress in scholarship on the history of Qing China.

Structurally, this book has four substantial chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to the Manchurian authority’s emotional and normative approach to maintaining a pristine “holy land” in Manchuria where the ethnic Manchu originated. The reader senses regret on the part of the ethnic Manchu group of the Qing imperial court for conquering China proper militarily in 1644 in the first place, and a desire that the pure or uncontaminated Manchu/Mongol way of life could be perpetuated outside the Great Wall.

What is missing, however, is any mention of the fact that the political legitimacy of the Qing regime was heavily based on power-showing between ethnic Han Chinese and ethnic Manchus at all levels of the bureaucracy and military. Mongols and Tibetans might have been autonomous, but not the Manchus. Most institutions of the “Han” Ming were religiously copied by the “Manchu” Qing, including strict Confucian education of all princes of the Manchurian royal family. Consequently, cultural assimilation with the Han ethnicity was inevitable and unstoppable: Even the elite Banner cavalrymen became urbanized and gradually read, wrote, and spoke Chinese. In this context, the term “Manchurian rule” is in fact an oxymoron after circa 1700. This is the reason why the nostalgia was recorded in the Manchurian language archives but not in their Chinese counterpart: the Manchurian normativity might not sell well among the Qing elite, of whom the Han Chinese made up the vast majority (even in terms of the number of imperial degree holders for the Qing bureaucracy).

Chapters 2 to 4 demonstrate everlasting tensions between the Manchurian normativity and the messy social and economic realities. According to the author, the real secret behind the “pearl/ginseng economy” (chap. 2), the “mushroom/wood economy” (chap. 3), and the “fur economy” (chap. 4) was the commonality of the unique natural resources in Manchuria and Mongolia, which were suited to traditional hunting and gathering methods. So the supply was extremely limited (or inelastic) and therefore scarce. But the demand for them was increasing, and the prices were on the rise. This was a universal story of market demand and supply.

The twist is, however, that there was the second force on the demand side—the Qing court and its command economy (taxation in the form of annual tribute from hunters and gatherers). Because the private market economy and the Qing command economy were both after the same bundle of luxury goods, confrontations between the market and the state were inevitable. Often, however, the seemingly powerful state was less informed and slower than market operators, be they cunning Chinese, corrupt Manchus, or half-hearted Mongols. At best, the Manchurian authorities faced the end result ex post, rather than nipping problem in the bud ex ante. This was the natural outcome of information asymmetry (or transaction costs) between the market and the state.

In such a context, the helplessness of Beijing was the true reason for nostalgia for the bygone non–market driven golden age, when the state taxed all luxuries at will and at their pleasure. Of course, for the sake of its public image and legitimacy, the Manchu clique in Beijing could not to be seen as a greedy and selfish rent-seeker before the eyes of the public in general and before the eyes of the non-Chinese living in Manchuria/Mongolia in particular. Thus, it opted to call for “Manchu ethnocentricity”—idealizing both Manchurian and Mongolian hunters and gatherers and environmental purity and naturalness in Manchuria and Mongolia.

Although one may fully appreciate the Manchurian top-down efforts as being in line with modern environmental protectionism, there was no evidence that Manchurian nostalgia went any further than lip service: The book provides the reader with ample evidence that all the taxable products of hunters and gatherers—freshwater pearls, wild ginseng, steppe mushrooms, natural furs—were depleted one after another. The moral preaching of Beijing failed miserably in the end, partly because the Manchurian upper classes, including the royal family, had no intention of setting an example by returning to the wilderness in Manchuria or Mongolia. Call it a double standard it you will.

Overall, the reader will find this book informative, despite frequently interrupting Manchurian and Mongolian words inserted in the middle of sentences. The archival materials written in the Manchurian and Mongolian languages are unconventional and often incompatible with imperial records written in Chinese. This may confuse those who are well versed in the latter. The rational explanation has to be that those issues recorded in the Manchurian and Mongolian languages were largely irrelevant to China proper, so much so that the Qing imperial archivists could not be bothered to create Chinese entries in the Qing archives. In other words, there was a deliberate self-selection process regarding information propensity or bias. If this were so, the impact of all the concerns and measures had to be extremely limited. Indeed, if one reads between the lines of the cited materials written in the Manchurian and Mongolian languages, one can see that the communities in question numbered no more than a few thousand souls and the quantities of luxuries worth three- to four-figure sums (measured in catties and number of pelts, beads, plants, and so forth) were rather trivial for an empire of the size of China. So, the importance of the luxuries should not be overplayed.