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

Online ISBN:
9781503600683
Print ISBN:
9780804799966
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

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

Jonathan Schlesinger
Jonathan Schlesinger
Indiana University Bloomington
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Published:
11 January 2017
Online ISBN:
9781503600683
Print ISBN:
9780804799966
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

Based on three years of archival research, A World Trimmed with Fur uses Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian records to rethink China’s environmental history in the years 1760-1830, when a rush for natural resources transformed both China and its borderlands. We tend to tell China’s environmental history in this period with settlers in mind: in the Qing empire’s frontiers, we are told, people like the Manchus, Mongols, and Tibetans maintained separate and untouched homelands before modern Chinese immigrants developed them. This book argues instead that the very notion of the untouched, like distinctions between Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese, was itself a product of empire and an invention of the boom years. Stunning reports poured into Beijing during these years: mussels disappeared from the wild; mushroom pickers destroyed the steppe; trappers killed the last fur-bearing animals. The empire’s response, in turn, was dramatic. In Mongolia and the northern borderlands, the court backed a so-called “purification” campaign to repatriate undocumented Chinese, investigate Mongols collaborators, and restore the land to a “pure” and pristine form. In the Northeast, the Qing state mobilized around efforts to establish controls on immigration and trade, control pearling, and allow mussel beds to revive. Results were mixed. Conservation succeeded in some regions; others were emptied of fur-bearing animals, stripped of mussels, or left bare around abandoned camps. We thus can ask: what did it mean for the land to be “pristine”?

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