Di guo zhi qiu
Subtitle: Qing chao de shan zhen, jin di yi ji zi ran bian jiang
By: (Mei) Xie Jian zhu ; Guan Kang yi
Contributors: Guan, Kang, translator
Edition: Di 1 ban
Publisher: Beijing da xue chu ban she = Peking University Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Beijing
Language: chi
Number of pages: 261
ISBN-13: 9787301305515
Subjects: Luxuries; History; Natural resources; Restoration ecology; Kings and rulers; Social life and customs; Qing Dynasty (China)
Other titles: Qing chao de shan zhen, jin di yi ji zi ran bian jiang; World trimmed with fur; Diguo zhi qiu; Wild things, pristine places and the natural fringes of Qing rule
Work titles: World trimmed with fur
Description: 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. 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 216-241) and index.