Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou 1200–1700 (review)

We are living in a Golden Age of research and publication about the minority peoples of China’s borderlands, including the history of their relationships with China’s ruling dynasties and their reactions to the intermittent pressures of Chinese (Han) military garrisons and civilian settlers. Herman’s new book makes accessible for the first time the long story about how a portion of present-day Guizhou province in southwestern China, heavily populated by—and, until 1701, politically dominated by, an ethnic group known nowadays as the Nasu Yi—came under China’s control.

At great length, Herman successfully challenges the idea, set forth in Herold Wien’s influential China’s March to the Tropics (Hamden, Conn., 1954), that the indigenous peoples of the southwest were simply overwhelmed by the advanced technology and the Confucian civilization that land-hungry Chinese immigrants brought to them. By making fuller use of Chinese documents, as well as some Nasu Yi sources recently made available, Herman shows two things: first, that the incorporation of Guizhou into greater China was violent, the Yuan, Ming, and Qing states playing major roles in conquering and annexing that territory; second, that far from being overawed by China, the Nasu Yi boasted effective technologies and a script-based civilization of their own, and were never “swamped” by their big neighbor.

Herman’s narrative is valuable. Just because he does not encumber his text with postmodern or other fashionable theory, or engage the approaches of the social sciences, does not mean that he cannot deliver a sharp picture of the military and political interactions of the Nasu Yi (and various other southwestern peoples) with China. What the book lacks in interdisciplinary entanglements it more than recoups in vividness and detail. Real-world scenarios such as this one can offer evidentiary challenges to existing theoretical and social-science perspectives.

On the downside, Herman does not make a point of discussing the size or range of the Nasu Yi archive, or the provenance or reliability of the texts, and he seems to use modern Chinese translations rather than the original Nasu Yi materials. Modern scholarship has developed an understanding of the nature and limitations of the copious premodern Chinese written sources but not of the Nasu Yi sources. Though the flaw is not fatal, Herman’s blind acceptance of the Nasu Yi historiography unfortunately leaves unsettled the issue of whether and to what extent the Nasu Yi had created a genuine “civilization” relative to China’s. How widespread was its literacy? To what uses was its script put? Who wrote and who read Nasu Yi texts and documents? Was native Nasu Yi administration as dependent upon paper flow as China’s was?

Furthermore, Herman might have considered a few roughly analogous cases in world history for the purposes of comparison—dominating powers encountering smaller but literate, and by no means backward, peoples. England and its Celtic fringe, Russia and the Kalmyks, or the United States and the Cherokees spring to mind. A look at such cases would have helped to create a clearer understanding of China’s behavior and of Nasu Yi reactions.