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

In 1666, near the end of a campaign against the Nasu Yi in the Shuixi 水西 region of northwestern Guizhou 貴州, Governor-General Wu Sangui 吳三 桂 described a series of measures intended to establish more effective Qing 清 control over the region. He proposed that the state support Han Chinese immigration to Guizhou, expand mining and agriculture, and open Chinese schools. Optimistic that colonial policy in Shuixi could be reformed to create a profitable venture, Wu proposed to demarcate Yi tribal territory and granary units (則溪 zexi), transform them into taxable prefectures, depute officials, and conduct a census. Loyal sedentary farmers would produce enough grain to provision the military, pay taxes, and assist the government. In time, more settlers would be attracted to settle there (p. 207). Wu hoped that these policies would make it possible to eliminate or constrain the tusi 土司, indigenous chieftains whose loyalty to the empire allowed them hereditary rights to local government and freedom from Chinese law and fiscal policy.

Wu Sangui was overoptimistic. Military campaigns and occupations in Guizhou did not pay for themselves. By the eighteenth century, the Nasu Yi, who once ruled a powerful sovereign kingdom, had lost the ability to militarily resist the Han Chinese. On the other hand, the Qing court never managed to eradicate the tusi, or to fund the occupation of Guizhou on the basis of tax revenues. Wu Sangui, for his part, rebelled against the Qing, attempted an alliance with Tibet and Burma, and proclaimed himself emperor of the Zhou 周 Dynasty before succumbing to dysentery in 1678.

A description of the Qing stalemate in Guizhou—indigenous regimes were extinct but Chinese government initiatives were highly constrained—marks the end of John E. Herman’s excellent book Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700. This work describes the long effort by successive Chinese regimes to establish territorial sovereignty over the multicultural landscape at its southwest periphery.

Tang and Song policy in the southwest involved alliances and trade relationships with independent polities. The frontier was a vast zone, and interstate relations were not governed by clearly delineated boundaries. As frontier realms came under imperial suzerainty, they were organized into counties and prefectures, though civil and military posts in the most remote and challenging locales could not be predictably and reliably staffed. Outside of the administrative circumference, tractable leaders were designated as the leaders of autonomous haltered-and-bridled prefectures (羈縻州 jimi zhou). The Tang and Song courts also offered state recognition to prominent families (大姓 daxing) who governed neutral or nominally allied buffer territories. Classifying territory and loyalty according to conceptual distance from an imperial center, the structure calls to mind a real-world implementation of the concentric and hierarchical Five Precincts (五服 wufu) spatial imaginary laid out in the Warring States era Yugong 禹貢 [Tribute of Yu].

The Mongol era, with its tradition of military conquest and multicultural rule spanning all of Eurasia, occasioned a major change from Tang and Song practices, and provided the roadmap for Ming and Qing policy as well. On the southwestern frontier, Herman implies, there was no Tang-Song transition, but rather a watershed between Tang-Song practices and Yuan-Ming-Qing ones. The Mongols occupied Yunnan and Guizhou in order to outflank the Song from the southwest. By mid-1256 Yunnan was occupied by 20 Mongol brigades, and in 1274 the founding of a Branch Secretariat there, led by Sayyid ‘Ajall Shams al-Din, a loyal Muslim from Bukhara, marked the formal incorporation of Yunnan and Guizhou into the empire (p. 48). Some independent regimes resisted Mongol conquest, but in regions under Branch Secretariat control there were highways, postal relay stations, and territory divided into a Chinese-style political landscape of circuits (道 dao), routes (路 lu), prefectures (府 fu and 州 zhou), and counties (縣 xian). Haltered-and-bridled prefectures and prominent families, which lay outside the fiscal and legal structure of the court, were not...