A World Trimmed with Fur

Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule

Jonathan Schlesinger

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503600683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

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.

ONE

The View from Beijing

“Ah, it is lamentable! It has been over a hundred years since China fell but, remarkably, the mode of dress is still the same as before the downfall. It has come down through actors in the theater.”¹ So mused Pak Chiwŏn (1737–1805), a Korean polymath and satirist, who visited China in 1780 and realized, to his horror, that there were but two types of men dressing in a civilized manner: Koreans and period actors. Everyone else in China dressed rudely, like barbarians, in furs. He had come from Seoul to pay tribute to the Qing emperor, Qianlong (r. 1735–1795). Yet the emperor himself seemed to dress the part of a barbarian ruler: He not only wore furs but mandated others at court do so as well. Indeed, when the diplomacy was concluded, Qianlong sent Pak Chiwŏn home with a signature token of Qing generosity: sable pelts. To be Manchu was to wear fur, and, by the late eighteenth century, not only Manchu elites wore it; Chinese elites did so as well.

Pak Chiwŏn knew something had changed: Prior to the Qing conquest, one could see the difference between Manchus and Chinese. Their bodies were distinct: Chinese men grew out their hair; Manchu men wore the queue.² Chinese women bound their feet; Manchu left them natural. Their clothes differed as well. Manchu elites wore fur; Chinese wore silk. Manchus wore riding boots and jackets cut with “horse-hoof” sleeves; Chinese elites dismissed equestrian fashions.³ By the eighteenth century, 100 years later, the external marks of difference had begun to vanish: One could not so easily tell a Manchu from a Chinese by their looks.⁴ In part, this shift in material culture reflected the Manchus’ gradual assimilation to life in Beijing; in part, it reflected the fact that, for Chinese elites, furs no longer marked a Manchu sensibility but a broader imperial one.

Indeed, a sea change occurred in eighteenth-century China: Frontier products like fur became markers of elite Chinese fashion. By 1800, visitors to Beijing marveled at what the city had to offer: marten and ermine jackets, steppe mushrooms from Mongolia, freshwater pearls from Manchuria, vendors of game meat, men and women in “horse-hoof” cuffs, and sometimes live elephants, tigers, and bears. In the Ming period (1368–1644), no Chinese word existed for products such as “marten” and “ermine.” In the Qing, connoisseurs, pawnshop owners, and the court filled in the blanks: Real knowledge of the marketplace demanded not only a new vocabulary but new stories about the meaning and provenance of such products. Faux furs, farmed ginseng, and imitation steppe mushrooms flooded the streets, but consumers wanted the real thing: undyed, uncultivated products from unvarnished frontiers.

From the mid-eighteenth century, as the following chapters will show, such sensibilities and shifts in consumption helped transform the empire’s frontiers. To understand that process, however, we must begin in the imperial center first. Critically, the stories people told about frontier products dovetailed with stories they told about each other: Qing subjects were making sense of their place in the empire, of who should rule, of history, and of untouched nature.

THE MEASURE OF THINGS

It is easy to take for granted how the objects of our lives mark the passing of time. Technology and design are indicative of the age, of course, as are fashion and materiality. It is not only the form of things that marks time, moreover: Their variety and quantity are telling, too. Yet looking back we can only generalize so much: To be without the latest technologies or fashions, or to lack material wealth, is hardly atavistic, and our material legacy, no less than our written one, is neither simple nor one directional. Diversity and inequality have been the norm.

Yet, historiographically, a generalization that seems to hold is that the amount of things in our lives has been growing since the sixteenth century, particularly in centers of commerce and production, such as in China. From the late fifteenth century onward, Ming China had flourished. Consumption surged, markets grew, land use intensified, and industries and agriculture expanded to new frontiers. People in China produced and consumed as many things, or more, as those in Western Europe.⁵ Compared to earlier periods in Chinese history, people in the late Ming had more choice and owned more than ever. The luxury consumer had access to products from throughout the Ming empire and from throughout the greater region: wools and felts from the Mongol steppe, musk from Tibet, deerskins from Taiwan, silver from Japan, and ginseng from Korea. After 1571, with the establishment of peace with Altan Khan, who ruled in today’s Inner Mongolia, the pace of trade with Inner Asia only increased. That same year, with the founding of Spanish Manila, products from the Americas, too, became accessible via the galleon trade: Silver from Mexico and Potosí came to serve as a new basis for currency and taxation; tobacco smoking went viral; farmers began to plant potatoes, corn, and chili peppers. The global age had begun.⁶

As consumption accelerated, older markers of status grew less important. It became difficult to gauge someone’s status simply by looking at him or her: “Nowadays . . . the very servant girls dress in silk gauze, and the singsong girls look down on brocaded silks and embroidered gowns.”⁷ To maintain their distinction, elites turned to connoisseurship. Guides for cultured living, such as A Treatise on Superfluous Things (Zhangwu zhi), became bestsellers, offering advice on what the proper gentleman should buy and collect; what made one civilized, such works suggested, was in part a function of what one consumed. As Timothy Brook has shown, maintaining high status required purchasing not just a Ming vase but acquiring the proper Japanese table to place it on and putting the appropriate number of flowers inside (“any more than two stems and your room will end up looking like a tavern”).⁸

When the Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644 and the Manchus marched on Beijing, they seemed to belong to a different world. They looked nothing like the people they conquered; rather then dressing like elites, they appeared like “barbarians” (Ch: hu). Other differences stood out. They spoke and wrote in a foreign language. Their men shaved their hair in the front and let it grow in the back into a long ponytail (the “queue”). Their women refused to bind their feet and so kept them natural. Their aristocracy rode horses, celebrated warrior culture, and wore furs and freshwater pearls. For all these reasons, European witnesses to the Qing conquest described the Manchus as accessible and natural: “They rejoice to see Strangers; they no way like the grimness and sourness of the Chinese gravity, and therefore in their first abords they appear more human.”⁹ The Manchus inspired the opposite reaction in Ming loyalists. Some died rather than become their subjects: Wen Zhenheng, the writer of Superfluous Things, committed suicide by starvation in 1645 after the Qing conquest of Suzhou.¹⁰

For their own part, the Manchus intended to look different. The early Qing court worked to win over as many loyalists as possible, and it adopted much of the governing language, institutions, and dress of the Ming court before it. Yet it also attempted to keep Manchus distinct, and although the court embraced classical Chinese political traditions, it simultaneously promoted certain Manchu ones as well. To become Chinese was taboo: The court sponsored organized hunts to encourage proper Manchu values and military élan, and it disciplined Manchus who lacked the required skills in archery, horsemanship, and the Manchu language. In time, as Manchus assimilated, the Qing court under the Qianlong emperor (r.1735–1795) would demand that Manchus compile and submit written genealogies to establish their line of descent. Through such efforts, it was hoped, the Manchus could preserve their unique “Manchu Way.” Those who most embodied it were the best at resisting the luxury and decadence of urban commercial life: Like unbound feet, the “Manchu Way” was unadorned, rustic, and “pure” (Ma: gulu or nomhon; Ch: chun or pu).¹¹

The very fact that the Manchus rose to conquer China reveals, of course, that they were hardly so simple. Manchuria, as much as China, participated in the global moment: like their Chinese neighbors, the people of Manchuria, too, had unprecedented options as consumers by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and they too smoked tobacco, traded for silver, and used cannons. The Manchurian economy turned on exports and was similar in this sense to other regions that boomed in the “silver belt” around Ming China, from Mongolia to Taiwan.¹² From as early as the fifteenth century, long-distance fur trade had grown, and Manchuria’s southern border regions had become home to merchants and intermediaries that connected Ming and Chosŏn consumers with trappers in Siberia, Sakhalin, and Outer Manchuria.¹³ The ginseng trade was even more lucrative than fur. Nicola Di Cosmo estimates that perhaps one-quarter of all silver imports from Japan and the New World found their way to Manchuria and the early Qing courts through ginseng purchases alone.¹⁴ Trade in high-end commodities, in turn, helped finance the rise of agriculture, which expanded in the sixteenth century to the point, as one historian put it, that “no field was left unplowed” in the south. At the same time, the region witnessed the growth of local markets and, by 1599, the creation of the first iron foundries.¹⁵ The Manchus were neither so simple nor unusually rustic: They were farmers, merchants, trappers, smelters, and soldiers.

The founder of the Qing imperial family, Nurhaci (1559–1626), drew from this economic and cultural diversity in his rise to power. The “Manchuria” of his time was notably diverse: It included myriad clans of Jurchens, who became the foundation of the later Manchu people, as well as Mongols, Chinese, and Koreans. Between 1599 and 1613, Nurhaci successfully incorporated peoples today who are largely forgotten: the Ula, Hada, Hoifa, and Khalkha in the watershed of the Sunggari River; the people known as “Hūrha” and “Warka” farther to the east. By 1616, through military campaigns, marriage alliances, and careful diplomacy, Nurhaci had consolidated control over the border region between the Ming and Chosŏn states. That year, he announced the founding of the “Later Jin” dynasty, in homage the first Jin dynasty (1115–1234), a medieval Jurchen state from which he claimed descent. In 1635, Nurhaci’s son, Hong Taiji (1592–1643), proclaimed that all Jurchens would henceforth be known as “Manchus,” and in 1636 he changed the dynasty’s name to the Da Qing, literally the Great Purity, from Chinese. The year after his death, the Ming emperor committed suicide, Qing armies crossed the Great Wall, and Qing rule in China began, though it would take almost four decades of further conflict to consolidate control.¹⁶

RUSTIC ROOTS AND THE QING COURT

We thus can imagine two Manchus. The first, sponsored by the court and central to the Manchu’s own sense of identity, draws from the idea of Manchu difference and emphasizes the recovery of a singular and timeless “Manchu Way.” The second, reconstructed by later historians, emphasizes the Manchus’ place in the larger early modern world, their cosmopolitan connections to greater Northeast Asia, and their adaptability, dynamism, and variability. The Qing court itself reflected the double image, one natural and one historical. The emperors lived as lavish consumers amid incredible opulence, in the center of the largest city in the ...