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A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule

Autor Jonathan Schlesinger
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 10 ian 2017
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources.

In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780804799966
ISBN-10: 0804799962
Pagini: 288
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.5 kg
Editura: Stanford University Press
Colecția Stanford University Press

Recenzii

"Schlesinger has written a tremendously important book. Through rigorous multi-archival and multi-lingual research, he brings the most valuable perspectives from the "New Qing History" into dialogue with scholarship on late imperial Chinese environmental history, thereby enriching our understanding of both fields. This is scholarship of the highest order."—Micah Muscolino, Oxford University

"Schlesinger offers many refreshing surprises as he punctures the idea of Manchuria as the Qing's last pristine wilderness. By showing just how disastrous the consumption of natural products could be on the environment and Manchu identity, he demonstrates the relevance of the Qing for understanding environmental consequences in our own world."—Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia

"Offering an exhaustively researched study using Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese sources, Jonathan Schlesinger describes in compelling detail the integration of Inner Asian sensibilities into Chinese metropolitan life and the creation of zones of indigenous purity on the frontier. The story of an elite desire for fur and other luxuries paired with a market-driven obsession with authenticity will find familiar echo today to anyone who has ever been in an airport duty-free shop."—Mark C. Elliott, Harvard University

Notă biografică

Jonathan Schlesinger is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University.

Cuprins

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction:
chapter abstract

In 1886, the explorer H. Evan James claimed to discover pristine nature in Manchuria; the only order in Manchuria, he enthused, was Nature itself. Strikingly, a century and half earlier, China's Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795) celebrated the region in similar language. Still further, his court went to extraordinary lengths to defend both the Manchu homeland and its unspoiled nature. What, then, constituted pristine nature in the Qing?

1The View from Beijing
chapter abstract

A momentous change occurred in eighteenth-century China: fur, together with other products that seemed both exotic and natural, became popular. What meaning did natural objects have in everyday life? Using archival and literary evidence, pawnshop records, travel accounts, and sumptuary laws, the chapter shows how consumer patterns and marketplace understandings of nature shifted through the course of the eighteenth century. From a world where no Chinese word existed for products such as "marten" and "Manchurian pearl," consumers ushered in a new one where connoisseurship of furs marked elite status, and words existed for every part of each animal's anatomy. Though faux furs, farmed ginseng, and imitation wild Mongolian mushrooms flooded the street, knowing consumers sought the real thing: undyed, uncultivated products from the far north. While at first a court fashion, by the mid-eighteenth century nature was for sale throughout the streets of Beijing.

2Pearl Thieves and Perfect Order
chapter abstract

Something strange happened in Manchuria under Qing rule: its freshwater mussels disappeared. Stranger still, the Qing empire did everything in its power to preserve them: draft soldiers; fortify passes; patrol rivers; send boats and horses and silver and men. It streamlined the bureaucracy and revamped the local administration. "Nurture the mussels and let them grow," the emperor ordered; let Manchuria have mussels. Chapter explores what happened: the collapse of the pearl fishery the attempts, in the language of the Qing court, to "nurture the mussels." The court put its full weight behind efforts to create a long-term sustainability: it reorganized the administrative structure, empowered territorial governors, and created militarized off-limits areas. Poachers were arrested; the mussels allowed to rest. Through a detailed description of the tribute system, the ecological crisis, and the court's response, the chapter documents how a reinvented Manchuria came to be.

3The Mushroom Crisis
chapter abstract

As the pearl crisis raged, a rush for wild steppe mushroom moved to the center of the imperial agenda in Mongolia. Unheralded and forgotten, steppe mushrooms were big business in the Qing; by the 1820s, thousands of undocumented workers crossed the internal boundary from China to Mongolia each year in search of mushrooms. The chapter opens with the case of a passport forger whose arrest triggered a court edict against mushroom picking in 1829; we have little else of the affair in Chinese. The archives in Ulaanbaatar, however, contain hundreds of documents that detail the long, violent conflict that culminated in his arrest. By analyzing the confessions of mushroom pickers and the depositions of local officials, the chapter reconstructs the history of the mushroom rush and explores how a recreating a "pure" and pristine environment in Mongolia became the top concern of the court.

4The Nature in the Land of Fur
chapter abstract

In the borderland with Russia, a similar crisis emerged with furs: From the Altai Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, sables, then foxes, then squirrels vanished from the forest. In response, the Qing state again mobilized itself for another "purification" campaign: it repatriated trespassers, reinforced the boundary line around hunting zones, and attempted to ensure the long-term sustainability of fur-bearing animals. The chapter documents the interconnections between local, regional, and global fur trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides a case study of the environmental crisis in Tannu Uriankhai lands, in modern Tannu Tuva. There too, the archives show, the Qing court attempted to "purify" local nature and remake it as pristine.

Conclusion:
chapter abstract

The resulting analysis of these dynamics provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature. We cannot understand the invention of "pure" nature, both within and beyond the China, without a more nuanced and multifocal understanding of empires or the archives they produced. Putting peripheral places like Mongolia at the center of our histories, and learning to look both ways across frontiers, allows us to gain new vantages on how to transcend entrenched distinctions between foreign and frontier, coast and continent, East and West. Ultimately, modern "nature" and Qing "purity" belong to a broader, global matrix of historical inventions. Nature as we know today has deep, imperial roots.