1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154628503321

Autore

Schlesinger Jonathan

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, CA : , : Stanford University Press, , [2020]

©2017

ISBN

1-5036-0068-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (288 pages) : illustrations

Classificazione

NO 8500

Disciplina

951/.03

Soggetti

Luxuries - China - History - 18th century

Luxuries - China - History - 19th century

Natural resources - China - Manchuria - History

Natural resources - Mongolia - History

Restoration ecology - China - Manchuria - History

Restoration ecology - Mongolia - History

Electronic books.

China Kings and rulers Social life and customs

China History Qing dynasty, 1644-1912

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Transcription Conventions -- Introduction -- One. The View from Beijing -- Two. Pearl Thieves and Perfect Order -- Three. The Mushroom Crisis -- Four. Nature in the Land of Fur -- Conclusion -- Appendix. Fur Tribute Submissions, 1771–1910 -- Notes -- List of Chinese Terms -- Works Cited -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

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. In A World



Trimmed with Fur, 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.