The Cultured Nature of Imperial Foraging in Manchuria

This article uses Chinese and Manchu sources to examine “imperial foraging” in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a primary form of environmental relations between humans and the ecology of Manchuria. The article shows that Manchus and Manchuria were not simply conceptual products of exclusive human interaction alone, but tangible results of interactions between humans and other regional biodiversity. The article traces the nascent Manchu state’s initial existential dependence on this biodiversity as it evolved, after 1644, into a deliberate state policy to orchestrate hunting and gathering culture beyond immediate material sustenance. State exploitation of regional resources, especially in the form of resource enclaves, constructed a “borderland Manchu” identity distinct from that in China proper, a differentiation based on varying degrees of alienation from northeastern flora and fauna. Regional diversity, however, inhibited state orchestration of environmental relations partly because of inherent contradictions in resource exploitation and preservation. The complexity of interdependencies between nature and culture under an imperial foraging regime ensured that a forage crisis inevitably included an identity crisis, visible by the nineteenth century.