Growing academic interest in Qing borderland history in recent years in both English and Chinese scholarship has been mostly confined hitherto to discussions over ethnicity, culture and policy. Taking an alternative environmental approach, and making substantial reference to underutilised and unused sources in both the Manchu language and Han Chinese, alongside the environmental science literature, David A. Bello's comparative study marks a significant contribution to the field. He offers a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of Qing state borderland policies, borderland peoples and ecological counter-pressures in three frontier regions: the Manchuria Sahaliyan-Amur-Heilong or SAH River basin; the southern Inner Mongolian Steppe; and the mountainous frontier of southwest Yunnan/Myanmar. These three regions are metaphorically abbreviated as the forest, steppe and mountain of the book's title.
Emphasising the interdependency and variability of social-ecological action, Bello characterises Qing imperial borderland construction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a process of ecologically unsustainable and culturally destructive top-down adaptation and maladaptation to opportunities and challenges. The ecological and cultural foundations of the borderland economies (foraging, herding and swiddening, or slash-and-burn agriculture) were destroyed by excessive state-led resource extraction and mismanagement. Overregulation, imposed ethnic policies and migration (both anticipated and unanticipated), damaged the same borderland ethnic identities the state authority was trying to preserve.
Chapter 1 sets out the two main forms of environmental relations between peoples and ecologies that formed the foundation for Qing economic and military power: the ‘arablism’ (arable-ism) network mainly constructed by Han Chinese in China proper (inner or core regions of China, traditionally consisting of 18 provinces), and the ‘venery’ or hunter-prey network primarily sustained by Manchus and Mongols in Inner Asia. Arablism and venery are used to refer to the production forms of farming and hunting respectively, as well as the cultures and ethnic identities associated with them. Contrasting with these two main culture-nature networks, other environmental relations were developed through state-led adaptation to specific regional borderland conditions. Discussion of three such variant networks, ‘imperial foraging’ in the SAH basin, ‘imperial pastoralism’ in southern Inner Mongolia and ‘imperial indigenism’ in southwestern Yunnan, forms the main analysis of the book.
In the Manchurian borderlands, under pressure from seventeenth-century Russian incursion and Qing imperial exigency to preserve a Manchu ethnic identity through maintaining the traditional Manchu culture-nature foraging relation, the Qing imperial administration created a rigid and unsustainable state system of imperial foraging. Excessive extraction of ginseng and sable pelt eventually led to resource depletion. The resulting forage crisis profoundly changed the Manchu lifestyle and eroded the hunter-soldier identity, causing a ‘critically short supply’ of Manchus by the nineteenth century, according to Bello (p. 106).
In southern Inner Mongolia, factors leading to ecological and cultural destabilisation were similarly embedded in the very process of dynastic construction, in this case of the ‘banner Mongol’ ethnic identity through imperial pastoralism. Tight controls were imposed on key aspects of the pastoral economy, including pasture delineation, livestock breeding, herding personnel and milk consumption. In response to fluctuating, extreme steppe ecological conditions, the state provided non-regionally specific disaster relief in the form of grain and silver instead of the livestock needed to replenish the stricken Mongol herds. This induced and intensified the impoverished herders’ reliance on Han agricultural produce, and thus unintentionally discouraged herders from raising livestock. Meanwhile, this region's fragile but flexible ecotone (a transition area between two ecosystems, in this case pastoral to the northwest and agrarian to the southeast) proved amenable to Han development. This occluded or entirely precluded pastoralism, attracted unanticipated Han migration, and further damaged the Mongol ethnic identity and intended ecological relation.
In contrast to their attempts to control the role of livestock on the steppe, forage in the forest, and game beyond the Great Wall, the dynastic authorities were unable even to conceive of the importance of mosquitoes as vectors of malaria in mountainous southwest Yunnan. Instead of direct management of the people-environment relation in this region, the Qing state was forced to adopt the administrative compromise of ‘imperial indigenism’: indirect borderland formation through a system of native chieftainships. These chieftainships were important in securing malarial areas inaccessible to Qing military power, but were unable to form a stable unambiguous ‘civilized tribal identity’ (p. 3) that could help project dynastic power in the region and effectively block indigenous fraternisation with Myanmar. Between about 1775 and 1825 there were surges of uncontrolled ‘shack peoples’, agricultural migrants mainly composed of Han Chinese from China proper who practiced unsustainable Han-style swiddening instead of the more sustainable indigenous form that included strict regulation on fallowing. This resulted in deforestation, erosion and siltation on south-west Yunnan hillsides.
Bello's scholarly work offers pioneering insights into identifying the significant role played by ecology in Qing borderland construction and understanding the complex human-ecology interactions in state policy failure. Examples of unforeseen consequences and unanticipated circumstances abound, such as the long-term effects of an unbalanced gender composition in Manchurian game kills, shortage of snowfall and decline in tribute numbers of honey and sable pelts, and Mongolian herder-livestock competition for mares’ milk. While the book clearly focuses on inland borderlands, a brief discussion of the long and diverse sea border could have provided valuable additional context.
The strength of Bello's scholarship lies in his substantial use of sources in Manchu, the primary language of communication in borderland regions. Some of these sources offer quantitative data that adds to our understanding of Qing borderland livelihoods, such as the size and composition of Qing borderland households (tables 2 and 3, pp. 89–92), the scale of pressure from imperial tributes (tables 4 and 5, pp. 98–9) or the size and changes in herding activities in the Mongolian frontier (table 8, p. 126). However, a lack of evidence on population trends that might support the book's human-ecology thesis will disappoint some readers. The primary sources Bello relies on are mostly central governmental documents, including reports and letters by high-ranking officials, and occasionally emperors’ poems. Far fewer local records are available to this research, making it difficult to examine and substantiate the arguments at the level of individual families or communities.
