tea zomia global history

Across Zomia with merchants,monks, and musk: processgeographies, trade networks, andthe Inner-East–Southeast Asianborderlands*

C. Patterson Giersch

History Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USAE-mail: [email protected]

AbstractFor several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead

arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics

and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations

(such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing

on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process

geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river

valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan

and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities,

on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated

with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global

transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of

mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.

‘Zomia’ and process geographies

For several decades, geographers and other social theorists have challenged traditional

notions of space, arguing that human geography is dynamically transformed through histor-

ical processes. In the first place, there is ongoing interest in the ‘production of space’, a con-

cept proposed by the sociologist Henri Lefebvre and developed by geographers such as Neil

Smith.1 Anchored by materialist approaches to human society, these studies demonstrate

� This article was written at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College, and supported byfunding from the Wellesley College Dean’s Office. I am grateful to my NCH and History Departmentcolleagues for critical feedback. I thank Jean Michaud for inviting me to join this well-orchestratedenterprise. I also thank the editors and two anonymous readers for graciously providing insightful andconstructive suggestions.

1 Henri Lefebvre, The production of space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; NeilSmith, Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space, New York: Blackwell, 1984.

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Journal of Global History (2010) 5, pp. 215–239 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2010

doi:10.1017/S1740022810000069

how political and economic activities produce the geographical spaces and their representa-

tions in which we operate. A second French tradition – the Annaliste (particularly Braude-

lian) approach – continues to inspire inquiry into the cultural and economic ties that

shape world regions.2 For historians, these are noteworthy because both approaches seek

to historicize geographical studies while offering critical spatial analysis, and it is no wonder

that both underpin efforts to understand Asia’s past. Lefebvre has informed Manu Goswa-

mi’s superb work on South Asia, while the Braudelian approach has left a major impact on

Southeast and South Asian studies. More recently, it has inspired Wim Van Spengen’s fas-

cinating reconstructions of the Inner Asian/South Asian borderlands.3 And both traditions

underpin the ambitious proposals for ‘Zomia’ studies.

First defined by Willem van Schendel, Zomia is an alternative world region, bringing to-

gether spaces and peoples marginalized in mainstream academia. As with Jean Michaud’s

‘Southeast Asian Massif’, Zomia encompasses the transnational highland peoples of eastern

India, mainland Southeast Asia, south-west China, and the high plateaus and ranges of the

Himalaya.4 Because these areas cross traditional Asian studies regions (Central, East, South,

and Southeast Asia), the concept is designed to challenge institutionalized regional studies

configurations. Such a proposal is exciting, although the creation of a new region, if imple-

mented without nuance, may lead to simplifications mirroring past Orientalist writing

about South or East Asian civilizations. Van Schendel offers several options to avoid this

trap, including employing methodologies built upon Lefebvre’s original insights: if, as

some contend, geographical spaces are neither fixed nor historically stable but are provi-

sional outcomes of social action and conflict, then we must combine history and geography

to recapture the dynamism of spatial production.5

In this spirit, this article reconstructs trade flows across several sectors of Zomia. Instead

of beginning with Zomia and seeking ways of delineating its common attributes, however,

the article employs what Arjun Appadurai calls process geography. Writing in opposition to

the use of ‘trait geographies’, which emphasize language, culture, or other attributes affixed

to a people or a space, Appadurai endorses

an architecture for area studies that is based on process geographies and sees significant

areas of human organization as precipitates of various kinds of action, interaction, and

motion – trade, travel, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytisation, colonisation, exile, and the

like. These geographies are necessarily large scale and shifting . . . Put more simply, the

large regions that dominate our current maps for area studies are not permanent

geographical facts. They are problematic heuristic devices for the study of global

2 The inspiration is Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of PhilipII, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols., New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

3 For the Braudelian influence, see Markus P. M. Vink, ‘Indian Ocean studies and the ‘‘new thassology’’’,Journal of Global History, 2, 1, 2007, p. 43; Heather Sutherland, ‘Southeast Asia and the Mediterraneananalogy’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34, 1, 2003, pp. 1–20; Wim van Spengen, Tibetan borderworlds: a geohistorical analysis of trade and traders, London: Kegan Paul International, 2000.

4 Willem van Schendel, ‘Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in SoutheastAsia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 6, 2002, p. 10; Jean Michaud, Historicaldictionary of the peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006, p. 5.

5 Neil Brenner, ‘Between fixity and motion: accumulation, territorial organization, and the historicalgeography of spatial scales’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16, 1998, p. 462.

216 jjC . P A T T E R S O N G I E R S C H

geographic and cultural processes. Regions are best viewed as initial contexts for themes

that generate variable geographies, rather than as fixed geographies marked by pregiven

themes.6

In his original critique, van Schendel envisions Zomia as just such a heuristic device

designed to challenge the intellectual underpinnings and institutions for Asian area studies

and to open the door for process geographies. He notes how global processes cut across tra-

ditional spatial categories, causing many to question inherited geographical scales, including

the post-war inspired division of eastern Eurasia into the regions and disciplines of Asian

studies. The institutionalization of these regions has produced scholarship capable of invest-

igating certain preconceived geographical scales, including civilizations (East or South Asia),

nations or empires (China, India), or regions (mainland Southeast Asia). But if geographical

scales – the spatial configurations of power, culture, and economy – are not fixed, and are

instead produced through historical processes, then the inherited scholarly traditions and

institutions are ‘ill suited to deal with human activities spilling over’ the boundaries of civil-

ization, state, and region.7

One way to deal with spillover is to analyse things and people in motion, although this is

a major undertaking because people on the move might not record their motion; or their

records may reside in different places. To make this topic manageable, I focus on nine-

teenth- and twentieth-century trade ties that linked the Zomian communities in Kham

(south-east Tibet) with China’s Sichuan and Yunnan provinces and mainland Southeast

Asia (Figure 1). It is impossible, however, to overlook these areas’ links to the greater Hima-

layan region and India, to north-west China’s Qinghai and Gansu, and to distant Shanghai

and Hong Kong; thus, these connections will be mentioned as well. In practice, then, this is

an initial effort to evaluate trade flows among areas traditionally labelled East, Inner, South,

and Southeast Asia.8

Since this article is an exploration into process geographies, it does not fully survey com-

munities in the Zomian regions mentioned. Kham, for example, has a complex social and

political history. Considered one of Tibet’s historical provinces, its administration has,

for at least three centuries, often been divided among Tibet and the Chinese provinces of

Yunnan and Sichuan. Local Tibetans, often called Khampas, share many connections with

central Tibet, but also developed unique political and cultural practices, including, as

Matthew Kapstein writes, local political entities enjoying ‘a high degree of autonomy’.9 In

fact, the idea of autonomy seems to contribute to Khampas’ narratives of self-identification.10

While my larger project will explore the intricate connections between mobility (broadly

construed), on the one hand, and long-term social and cultural change in trading towns

6 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, Public Culture, 12, 1, 2000,pp. 6–7.

7 Van Schendel, ‘Geographies’, pp. 660–1.

8 Inner Asia includes Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet – areas sometimes included in Central Asia.

9 Matthew T. Kapstein, ‘A thorn in the dragon’s side: Tibetan Buddhist culture in China,’ in MorrisRossabi, ed., Governing China’s multiethnic frontiers, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press,2004, p. 230–3.

10 Melvyn C. Goldstein, Dawei Sherap, and William R. Siebenschuh, A Tibetan revolutionary: the politicallife and times of Bapa Phuntso Wangye, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, p. 9.

P R O C E S S G E O G R A P H I E S A N D Z O M I A jj217

and their adjacent Zomian highlands, on the other, this article focuses on the foundations of

the trade itself – the trading networks – and provides only an initial analysis of impacts on

local societies in Kham and elsewhere.

An investigation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century trade requires more than an

investigation into individual peddlers. Those involved included merchants, officials, lamas,

and hereditary leaders hailing from Kham, Tibet, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, France, and

South Asia. These people represented states (Tibet; imperial China and, after 1912, its suc-

cessor regimes), local polities or administrative sectors (Kham’s Chala region, Sichuan Prov-

ince), collectives based on home province or ethnicity, and commercial firms. Thus, the

movement of goods relied on networks of political and economic power linking human

beings across space and allowing them to influence commercial changes throughout broad

expanses. In other words, these networks allowed the powerful to ‘act at a distance’.11

The concept of acting at a distance comes from network theorists who, like those study-

ing the production of space, probe global capitalism’s development by evaluating how indi-

viduals and groups create and maintain relationships of power across different geographical

scales, whether local, regional, or global.12 An advantage of network theory is its catholic

coverage of institutions, whether political, religious, or commercial. For instance, we need

not privilege the imperial Qing state (1636–1912) or its ‘republican’ Chinese successors

(1912–49), although we must acknowledge their power. Nor must we focus exclusively

on businesses, whether international or local. Instead, we can evaluate traders within the

context of their fluid, intertwined networks.

The emphasis on networks has several advantages. It avoids any tendency to create

Zomia as a new world region, complete with its own simplified trait geographies and un-

connected to developments in the world around it. It also begins to unveil the mechanisms

that humans built for interaction – between highland and lowland, inland and maritime, Ti-

betan and Chinese. The focus on networks, moreover, reveals alternative approaches that

both complement and challenge James C. Scott’s conclusions in his new book on Zomia,

The art of not being governed. While Scott emphasizes both the role of trade in Zomian

communities and interactions with powerful states, his analysis concentrates on the import-

ant issues of local autonomy and agency. For him, Zomia represents a region in which states

had little power before 1945; it was, in fact, a place where cultures and lifestyles were

designed to resist states: ‘Virtually everything about [Zomian] people’s livelihoods, social

organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be

read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length.’13 It was not, we

are told, until the late twentieth century that states gained the technologies (of transportation,

communication, etc.) to control mobile, highland peoples. They could then ‘monetize the

people, lands, and resources of the periphery so that they become . . . auditable contributors

11 Peter Dicken, Philip F. Kelly, Kris Olds, and Henry Wai-chung Yeung, ‘Chains and networks, territoriesand scales: towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy’, Global Networks: AJournal of Transnational Affairs, 1, 2, 2001, p. 96.

12 In particular, see ibid., pp. 94–7, 104.

13 James C. Scott, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia, NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. x, 8; see also James C. Scott, ‘Zomia as a ‘‘state-repellingspace’’’, unpublished paper for Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA, 3–6 April2008, pp. 14–16, 33–4.


to the gross national product’.14 In many ways, therefore, the highland people of Zomia

were ‘relatively free’ and, even when they accepted tributary status or changed their cultural

practices to imitate lowland (state-making) groups, Scott implies that this was an instru-

mentalist (and therefore rational?) choice that did not contradict the overall goal of resist-

ance nor the control that Zomian communities had over their destinies.15 This argument

suggests that the one great turning point for Zomia’s people arrived in the mid twentieth

century, and that the beginning of the end for institutions of freedom and cultures of resist-

ance was the building of nation-states in Southeast Asia and communist China.

There is much to learn from these conclusions, but there is also room for alternative

interpretations. Until the 1950s, most areas of Zomia were not governed by modern

nation-states but were, as Scott notes, subject to the indirect rule of empires such as Qing

China, Kon-baung Burma, Britain, and France. Nevertheless, networks of state and com-

mercial power did snake through the highland regions, however tentatively, and local peo-

ples had to take notice. This was true in the mining areas of eighteenth-century China and

Vietnam, as well as in the grasslands, trade markets, and border customs stations that were

linked through the twentieth-century trade networks discussed here. From early times, mer-

chants from many backgrounds developed institutions to buy, sell, and transport resources

across the rough lands and long distances of Zomia. This was often accomplished in collu-

sion with political representatives and local elites, meaning that, even in eras before the

arrival of nation-states, commerce helped bolster powerful social, political, and religious

hierarchies, whether local, Chinese, or Tibetan. In placing networks at the centre of this

story, then, we can begin to analyse how vectors of power entered Zomia, even before

1945, meaning that the rise of the nation-state (while still vastly important) cannot be

viewed as the signal historical moment.

The study of trade flows also allows us to cross the artificial conceptual boundaries of

the Asian studies regions. It is possible to trace the emergence of networks that linked to-

gether peoples and places, creating a trans-frontier economic space that might be called

Zomia, although this may be a misnomer because the space comprised highlands and valley

even as its constitution changed in response to regional and global contingencies. In particu-

lar, this article demonstrates how merchants, including those from peripheral (‘Zomian’?)

communities in north-west Yunnan with a background in the Kham trade, innovated to cre-

ate new networks linking Inner Asia’s Kham highlands to East Asian metropolises and to

South and Southeast Asian ports.

In order to construct and maintain commercial ties, traders innovated and adapted. One

category of adaptation included acculturation and the development of institutions to facilit-

ate cross-cultural contacts. Another type included the development and implementation of

new business practices that allowed men from communities of Zomia to flourish in the colo-

nial ports of Burma, Indochina, India, and Hong Kong – where they and their firms could

develop an interface with the globe. Processes of acculturation and adaptation were com-

plex and multidirectional, but they reveal that Zomia was not just a place shaped by cul-

tural refusal or the avoidance of external institutions of power, whether state or

14 Scott, Art, pp. 4–5, 11.

15 Ibid., pp. 19, 22.


commercial. Local peoples had to reckon with states and commercial networks, and such

reckoning meant acquiring new practices, whether language acquisition or other changes.

The incentives for such change included the desire to access, rather than avoid, networks

of power and wealth.

Finally, the emphasis on trade flows and networks demonstrates how process geography

can be a tool for recovering spatial relationships and geographical representations that

became hidden in the post-war era. The Yunnan merchants who built businesses across

China, Southeast Asia, and Tibet arranged their activities, networks, and even lifestyles

around movement through spaces that included Mandalay, Hong Kong, Lhasa, and even

India and Europe. Those movements, however, proved to be fundamentally at odds with

other powerful historico-spatial trends, including new visions of national space emphasizing

China’s boundedness, and they were destroyed after 1949, when the creation and enforce-

ment of national boundaries temporarily triumphed.

A brief history of trans-Zomia trade

For centuries, the people of Zomia traded at various geographical scales. Most exchanges

took place over short distances: highlanders traded forest or animal products with valley-

dwellers to gain grain, tools, and cloth. Long-distance exchanges were also driven by ecolo-

gical differences. Perhaps the best documented has been Inner Asian exchanges of horses

and animal products for East Asian textiles and teas.16 However, extensive exchanges

between south-west China, Southeast Asia, and south China also date to ancient times. Yun-

nan’s Dali kingdom (937–1253) exported horses first to Vietnam and later to its eastern

neighbour, Song China.17 This represented a pattern in which inland areas, specializing in

forest, animal, and metal products, engaged with south China’s and Southeast Asia’s mari-

time economies, which provided textiles and tea.

Tibetan regions, including Kham, were intimately involved in early trade. In the seventh

century CE, traders were already moving gold and musk along routes linking Lhasa with

both East and South Asia.18 From the thirteenth century, Shaanxi and Muslim Chinese

(Hui) merchants became deeply involved in the Tibet trade. As the Mongol Yuan court

forged ties between Lhasa and Beijing, for instance, Shaanxi merchants built on these con-

nections to trade in tea, wool, musk, cloth, and medicines.19 As important as these commer-

cial ties were, however, the volume of goods was relatively small when compared to later

times.

16 See, for example, Paul J. Smith, Taxing heaven’s storehouse: horses, bureaucrats, and the destruction ofthe Sichuan tea industry, 1074–1224, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1991.

17 Lu Ren, Yunnan dui wai jiaotong shi (A history of Yunnan’s foreign communications), Kunming:Yunnan minzu, 1997, pp. 136–42, 240; Tu Yaojun and Lu Minsheng. ‘Qingdai Zhong Yue maoyitongdao tanxi (An investigation into China–Vietnam trade routes during the Qing dynasty)’, GuangxiDifangzhi (Guangxi gazetteer), 4, 2004, pp. 38–40.

18 Van Spengen, Tibetan border worlds, pp. 72–3.

19 Chen Chongkai, ‘Shaan shang zai kaituo ‘‘xixi’’ Han-Zang maoyi zhong de lishi zuoyong (History of theimpact of Shaanxi merchants on the opening of ‘‘north-west–south-west’’ Han–Tibetan trade)’, Xinanminzu xueyuan xuebao, zhexue shuhui kexue ban (Journal of the Southwest Nationalities Institute,philosophy and social sciences edition), 19, 4, 1998, p. 44.


By the beginning of the eighteenth century, quantitative and qualitative changes to long-

distance trade had emerged. Denser merchant and state networks were built into highland

areas in order to facilitate sustained and high-volume transportation of bulk goods.

Responding to increasing demand among growing migrant communities in Yunnan, for

instance, Han and Hui merchants imported tremendous amounts of raw cotton, purchased

at markets in Burma’s and Siam’s territories.20 As commerce grew in early modern Eurasia

so did the demand for copper cash, which was fuelled by economic activity throughout the

South China Sea. At this point, south-east Yunnan mines increased output, and Vietnamese

merchants came to purchase copper at the Vietnam–China border.21 When Japan limited

copper exports in 1715, bronze coins became increasingly dear as cash shortages plagued

the South China Sea trading world.22 Demand for copper cash drove both northern Viet-

nam’s Trinh rulers and the Qing into the Sino-Southeast Asian borderlands, where veins

of copper ran from north-east Yunnan’s hills to those of northern Vietnam. The Qing and

Trinh promoted mining, which attracted tens of thousands of Chinese miners to the Zomian

highlands.23 Mining in Yunnan and northern Vietnam helped fuel commercial growth

throughout eastern Eurasia but it also provoked profoundly localized and lasting demo-

graphic, political, and economic changes in the mining areas.24

The highlands of Inner Asia experienced similar trends toward state- and merchant-led

penetration. The early Qing government continued to promote tea–horse exchanges and

allowed private merchants to participate. By the beginning of the eighteenth century,

Sichuan’s private markets had begun to outsell the official tea–horse markets further north.

This did not signal state withdrawal from commerce, however. In response to the Dalai

Lama’s request, the Kangxi emperor designated Dajianlu (also known as Tachienlu, Dar-

rtse-mdo, Kangding) an official trade market in 1696, and merchants from all over China

came to deal in tea, which the Qing state managed through a permit system (Figure 2).

Based on the number of permits issued, the trade between Chinese and Tibetan merchants

in Kham rapidly increased.25

In the eighteenth century, moreover, the Qing state extended its control over Kham’s

rGyal-rong kingdoms through a series of military campaigns in the 1740s and 1770s (the

Jinchuan wars).26 In the troops’ wake marched merchants, many of whom operated out

20 Palace memorials (Zhupi zouzhe), Beijing Number One Archives, 112–7, QL 31 03 29, Yang Yingju;1733–2, QL 11 05 09, Zhangbao; 142–1 QL 34 01 19, Fuheng.

21 Lu, Yunnan, pp. 213–16, 240–4.

22 Alexander Woodside, ‘Central Vietnam’s trading world in the eighteenth century as seen in Le QuyÐon’s ‘‘Frontier chronicles’’’, in K. W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore, eds., Essays into Vietnamese pasts,Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1995, pp. 168–9.

23 Victor B. Lieberman, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 421–2, 435.

24 C. Patterson Giersch, ‘Cotton, copper, and caravans: trade and the transformation of southwest China,ca 1600–1900’, unpublished paper for ‘Chinese traders in the Nanyang: capital, commodities andnetworks’ conference, Taipei, 18–19 January 2007.

25 Chen, ‘Shaan shang’, pp. 44–6.

26 Roger Greatrex, ‘A brief introduction to the first Jinchuan war’, in P. Kvaerne, ed., Tibetan studies, Oslo:The Institute for Comparative Studies in Human Culture, 1994, vol. 1, pp. 247–63; Yingcong Dai, ‘TheQing state, merchants, and the military labor force in the Jinchuan campaigns’, Late Imperial China, 22,2, 2001, pp. 37–40.


of Dajianlu. From this time forward, Dajianlu was one of several trade markets that were

central to the Tibet–China trade, and Shaanxi, Hui, Sichuanese, and Yunnanese merchants

all moved in to establish long-lasting commercial institutions.27 These eighteenth-century

trends were reflected in nineteenth-century practices; one example is the Kham town of

Litang (Lithang). Located at an altitude over 13,000 feet, Litang’s climate could not sustain

agriculture, and its people imported grains from lower-altitude areas. Such localized

exchanges were nothing new, but Litang also became involved in long-distance trade net-

works. The pastures around Litang provided fodder for sheep, its wild lands sheltered

deer, and its rivers produced gold dust. As sustained commerce emerged, Litang was drawn

into networks that brought its commodities to distance places: by the nineteenth century,

great flocks of Litang sheep, destined for dinner tables in Chengdu, were driven out of the

highlands each August. The women of Chongqing purchased toilet powders made with

Litang deer antler; and Litang gold was brought to Dajianlu before being shipped into

China.28

If the eighteenth century witnessed an increasing penetration of state and merchant net-

works, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw another broad transition. European con-

quests in Burma and Vietnam, as well as the expansion of European influence in South Asia

and China, brought new opportunities to link with international markets. Caravan firms,

which had managed the trans-Zomia trade, responded by increasing their geographical

scales of operation, bringing their representatives, organizations, and goods into the markets

of east China, Southeast Asia, and India. Thus, tin from the Yunnan uplands, wool from

eastern Tibet’s Kham and Amdo (Qinghai), and musk from the Sichuan–Tibetan highlands

were increasingly shipped to Asia’s ports, often for export abroad.

As East and Inner Asia became more deeply enmeshed in global trade networks, the routes

from Tibet to Gansu became key trade highways for wool. From the 1880s through to the

1930s, trade flourished as first Mongols, Tibetans, and Chinese (both Hui and Han) and later

Europeans, Americans, and Japanese organized the purchasing and shipping of wool from the

Inner Asian grasslands through Gansu or Sichuan to Tianjin, where wool was exported

abroad.29 At the same time, Chinese and foreign firms invested in south-east Yunnan’s tin

mines. Tin ore was mined by local furnace companies (luhao) and then taken by mule or

human porter to Gejiu. There, both French and Chinese firms purchased tin and, after the

opening of the Hanoi–Kunming railway in 1910, shipped it by rail to Haiphong, where it

was loaded on steamers bound for Hong Kong and sold on the international market. Major

companies, including Jardine Matheson and Mitsui, handled the sales in Hong Kong.30

27 Dai, ‘Qing state’, pp. 79–80.

28 William Gill, The river of golden sand: the narrative of a journey through China and eastern Tibet toBurmah, London: John Murray, 1880, vol. 2, p. 125; William Woodville Rockhill, Diary of a journeythrough Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1894,pp. 357–8, 368–71; Alexander Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s journey to Tibet, 1904: a report by Mr. A. Hosie, HisMajesty’s Consul at Chengtu, on a journey from Chengtu to the eastern frontier of Tibet, London:Harrison and Sons, 1905 (reprinted London: The Stationery Office, 2001), p. 104.

29 James A. Millward, ‘The Chinese border wool trade of 1880–1937’, web-published article, 1994 (revised1999), http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/millwarj/#WEB-PUBLISHED_ARTICLES (consulted14 September, 2009), p. 5; Rockhill, Diary, p. 64.

30 Jiang Rusu, Yunnan Gejiu xiye diaocha (A survey of the tin industry in Yunnan’s Gejiu region), Beijing:Guoli Qinghua daxue Guoqing pucha yanjiu suo, 1940, pp. 41–4.


http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/millwarj/#WEB-PUBLISHED_ARTICLES

During the same period, Kham began to trade with the world: its wool and musk were

exported to British India,31 Southeast Asia, Shanghai and Hong Kong, and beyond. While

French firms sent representatives to Shanghai and even to Yunnan to purchase musk, Yun-

nanese firms were transformed to operate on geographical scales that took their representa-

tives throughout China and other Asian regions. The best known of these firms was

Xizhou’s Yongchangxiang, which was started as a partnership in 1903 by Yan Zizhen

(allegedly an ethnic Bai or minjia), Yan’s relative Yang Hongchun, and Peng Yongchang,

a Jiangxi native who had met Yan in Sichuan. Initially, the partnership operated on a rela-

tively small geographical scale, exporting Yunnan tea to Kham, importing textiles from

Sichuan, and buying Tibetan mushrooms and musk to sell in Yunnan. As capital and busi-

ness increased, Yan parted with Yang and Peng, developed new partnerships, and estab-

lished branches in Burma and India. His companies imported foreign textiles and

exported musk, raw silk, tea, and bear paw to Southeast and South Asia.32 Such a story

was not unique, and Yongchangxiang was only one of a number of pre-war Yunnan busi-

nesses that operated across international (and areas studies) boundaries. Their emergence

demonstrates how firms with origins in the trans-Zomia caravan trade could be built into

complex international companies. The rest of the article places this transition into historical

context.

Trade routes and goods

Inner Asia’s Tibetan lands were linked to south-west China’s Sichuan and Yunnan provinces

through a number of routes. The most important went through Songpan and Dajianlu,

although Atunzi (Deqin, Deqen) was another town that saw valuable trade goods trans-

ported to Yunnan’s Lijiang and Dali trade markets.33 As on the northern routes that led

from Tibet through Xining, Lanzhou, and Xi’an, wool was a significant trade item, but

more important goods for these southern routes included opium, which has been explored

by numerous authors,34 pack animals, tea, musk, silver, and medicinal products. Since

many commodities were shipped via pony, mule, donkey, or yak, the raising and selling

of pack animals was central to the operation of these trade networks. Many ponies and

mules were raised in Kham and Amdo before being shipped to markets in Dali or even

31 Van Spengen, Tibetan border worlds, pp. 82–3.

32 Shen Xu, ‘Dali Baizu mabang yu shangbang de xingcheng yu fazhan (Emergence and development ofthe Dali Bai nationality’s caravan and commercial groups)’, in Na Qi, ed., Zhongguo Xinan wenhuayanjiu (Research in the culture of south-west China), Kunming: Yunnan minzu, 2004, pp. 266–9.

33 William Woodville Rockhill, The land of the lamas: notes of a journey through China, Mongolia andTibet, New York: The Century Company, 1891, p. 285, n. 1.

34 See, for example, Report on the mission to China of the Blackburn Chamber of Commerce, 1896–1897,Blackburn: The North-east Lancashire Press Company, 1898, Bourne report, pp. 76, 85–90; ChirananPrasertkul, Yunnan trade in the nineteenth century: southwest China’s cross-boundaries functionalsystem, Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 1989, p. 51; Jie Lesan,‘Qingzhengyu shanghao huiyi lu (Recollections of the Qingzhengyu business firm)’, in Zhongguo renminzhengzhi xieshanghuiyi Yunnansheng weiyuanhui, wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Yunnan wenshi ziliaoxuanji (Selected sources for Yunnan literature and history), Kunming: Yunnan renmin, 1989, vol. 9,pp. 28–45; Qin Shucai, Yunling jinjiang huahuo zhi: Yunnan minzu shangmao (Commodities of the Yunmountain range and Jinsha river: Yunnan nationalities’ trade), Kunming: Yunnan jiaoyu, 2000, pp. 70–1.


further south; ponies were also raised in Sichuan and Yunnan, their sale being central to

large fairs in places such as Lijiang.35

For centuries tea was the most crucial commodity linking Tibet to China. It was

imported into all regions of Tibet, and much of it came from Sichuan’s Yazhou (Ya’an)

region, although some came from southern Yunnan as well. Yazhou ‘brick tea’ (zhuancha)

consisted of tea leaves along with the stems and branches of tea bushes and other plants.

These ingredients were chopped, dried, and then steamed before being packaged into

twenty-pound bricks.36 Although technically a green tea (because steaming arrested the oxida-

tion process), brick tea was recognized as a unique product for Kham and Tibet. Dajianlu was

a major trade market for brick tea and, by the nineteenth century, the volumes of tea traded

there were large. Various estimates placed annual amounts at over 10 million lb.37

A second important trade item was musk, which was exported from the Kham highlands

to China and the world. Musk is taken from the glands (‘pods’) of the male musk deer. Long

considered an ingredient for perfumes in Europe, it is still valued in China and Korea as a

treatment for the cardiovascular system – so much so that over-hunting threatens most

musk deer species.38 While there are multiple species of musk deer, it is the Black and Hima-

layan musk deer (Moschus fuscus; M. chrysogaster) that are found in Yunnan, Kham, and

Tibet.39 And it was Kham musk (often called ‘Tonkin musk’) that came to be prized by Eur-

opeans.40 As a global trade in perfumes expanded in the 1840s, Europeans gained access to

Tonkin musk via Guangzhou.41 Almost eighty years later, in 1919, Austin Clements esti-

mated Dajianlu’s musk trade to be the largest in the world, and the main consumers, in

addition to Chinese, were Americans, Europeans, and Japanese.42

The supply of musk to world markets linked numerous people to global processes.

Hunters from among Tibetans in Yerkalo or the Nung (Lou-tse to French missionaries) in

Tsarong district sold their musk pods locally for silver (probably imported from India). At

35 Gill, River, vol. 2, pp. 108, 349; C. P. Fitzgerald, The tower of five glories: a study of the Min Chia of TaLi, Yunnan, London: Cresset Press, 1941 (reprinted Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1973), pp. 56–64;Qin, Yunling jinjiang hua huozhi, p. 50.

36 For details on manufacturing, see Arthur de Rosthorn, On the tea cultivation in western Ssuch’uan andthe trade with Tibet via Tachienlu, London: Luzac & Co., 1895, pp. 25–6.

37 Desgodins estimated at least 6 million livres of tea imported each year; Rockhill estimated 10–13 millionlb through Dajianlu alone, with another million lb each via Lijiang and Songpan; Hosie estimatedover 11 million lb through Dajianlu. See C. H. Desgodins, La mission du Thibet de 1855 a 1870, Verdun:Ch. Laurent, 1872, pp. 298–300; Rockhill, Land, p. 277; Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s journey, pp. 211–22.

38 John Pickrell, ‘Poachers target musk deer for perfumes, medicines’, National Geographic News, 7September 2004, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0907_040907_muskdeer.html(consulted 29 June 2009).

39 Qisen Yang, Xiuxiang Meng, Lin Xia, and Zuojian Feng, ‘Conservation status and causes of decline ofmusk deer (Moschus spp.) in China’, Biological Conservation, 109, 3, 2003, pp. 333–42.

40 C. Deite, A practical treatise on the manufacture of perfumery: directions for making all kinds ofperfumes, sachet powders, fumigating materials, dentifrices, cosmetics, etc., etc., trans. William T.Brannt, Philadelphia, PA: Henry Carey Baird & Co., 1892, p. 178.

41 J. R. Morrison, Chinese commercial guide, 3rd rev. edn, Canton: Chinese Repository, 1848, pp. 176–7.

42 Austin J. Clements, ‘Musk: its origin and export’, North China Daily News, June 1919, reprinted HongKong: University of Hong Kong Libraries, 2006, http://lookup.lib.hku.hk/lookup/bib/B34850375(consulted 30 March 2010); ‘Notes on trade and industry abroad’, New York Times, 31 July 1921, p. 87,retrieved 24 November 2009 from ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times (1851–2006).


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0907_040907_muskdeer.html

http://lookup.lib.hku.hk/lookup/bib/B34850375

Yerkalo in the mid nineteenth century, for instance, a hunter could sell an ounce of musk to

traders for 1.33 ounces of silver. The traders could move to the larger markets and gain sig-

nificant profits, selling an ounce of musk at Batang (Bathang) or Atunzi for 2.2 ounces of

silver; at Dajianlu, one ounce of musk earned 3 ounces of silver. By the 1910s, when Clem-

ents studied the Dajianlu market, the cost of an ounce of musk had risen to 11–14 ounces of

silver. These rising prices produced changes in the musk trade as Han Chinese increasingly

moved into Kham to hunt for musk deer. Some hunters came to be represented by agents

who dealt in large quantities: Clements learned of a Tibetan agent with over 1,800 pods

to sell.43 In Dajianlu, the musk pods were trimmed and prepared for the Chinese and foreign

markets. ‘Preparation’ often included making the pod heavier (to increase the selling price)

by injecting anything from barley grains to pulverized beef.

From Dajianlu, musk entered the global markets either via Chengdu and Chongqing to

Shanghai (where, in the 1890s, at least one foreign firm annually purchased US$150,000-

worth) or through Atunzi, where a French company stationed a Monsieur Perrone as its

agent. From Atunzi, the musk was presumably shipped abroad via Vietnam or Burma.44

The volume of the musk trade can be estimated based on a few pieces of evidence. In 1893,

the Imperial Maritime Customs Returns for Chongqing reported over 4,500 lb of musk trans-

ported out of Sichuan; the value of this trade was 478,192 haiguan taels, which, based on an

estimated exchange rate of US$1.15 per tael, was the equivalent of almost US$550,000.45 In

the 1910s, Clements estimated that approximately 2,660 lb of musk were exported from

Dajianlu each year, the drop in volume being explained by the region’s post-Qing instability.

If tea was a Chinese product shipped into Tibet, and musk was a Kham product

exported globally, then silver was a crucial item that linked South Asia to these trade net-

works. Tibet exported large quantities of silver to China, and much of it seems to have

come from British India. The French missionaries in Tibet spoke of large quantities of

Indian rupee shipments,46 which Gill, writing in 1880, confirmed: ‘These rupees come in

thousands all through Tibet, [Lhasa], and on to the frontiers of China, where the merchants,

who eagerly buy them up, are, by melting them down, able to gain a slight percentage.’47

Rockhill also emphasized the Indian connection, arguing that annual surpluses of about

£34,125-worth of silver resulted from trade imbalances between Tibet and India, although

Gill’s comments suggest that Tibetan and Chinese merchants were engaged in arbitrage.

This silver found its way to Dajianlu in exchange for tea imports, and Dajianlu’s eight

forges then melted down the rupees and cast them into Sichuan-style jiuba ingots.48

43 Desgodins, Mission du Thibet, pp. 304–306; Clements, ‘Musk’.

44 Rockhill, Land, p. 283; see also Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s journey, pp. 211–22; Clements, ‘Musk’.

45 Rockhill, Diary, pp. 368–71. Exchange rate based on the 1889 rate reported in China Imperial MaritimeCustoms, Returns of trade and trade reports for the year 1889, Shanghai: Statistical Department ofthe IGC, 1890, part 2, H. B. Morse, ‘Pakhoi trade report for the year 1889’, pp. 510–15.

46 Desgodins, Mission, pp. 304–6.

47 Gill, River, vol. 2, pp. 77–8.

48 Rockhill, Land, pp. 206–9, 282. On arbitrage, see the articles by Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez,including ‘Cycles of silver: global economic unity through the mid-eighteenth century,’ Journal ofWorld History, 13, 2, 2002, pp. 391–427.


While other goods were exported from Kham, perhaps the most interesting, after musk

and silver, were ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine, including deer antler in velvet,

beimu (a small white bulb dug in Litang’s forests), and chongcao, which was particularly

valued in Guangdong. Coales explained chongcao (‘insect grass’) as ‘a dried caterpillar

about 2 inches long, which has been killed by a fungus of about the same length growing

out of one of its segments. It is supposed to be an excellent restorative to weak constitu-

tions.’49 The volumes of these products could be relatively high. In 1904, Hosie estimated

that Dajianlu annually exported over a ton of chongcao and over six tons of beimu.50

For every ounce of chongcao that found its way out of Litang and across the great

expanses to Guangdong’s markets, there were numerous transactions, involving many peo-

ple and their trade networks. So who produced and traded the goods? It is impossible to

reconstruct the activities of all involved, particularly primary producers. However, it is pos-

sible to reconstruct the transport and trade networks, which included merchants and their

firms, monks and their monasteries, brokers and their practices, and states and their offi-

cials.

Merchants, monks, brokers, and officials

It is unsurprising that Han and Hui merchant networks were important to the operation of

trade throughout Zomia. As bulk trade in copper, grain, cotton, and other goods developed

in the eighteenth century, Han and Hui merchants expanded their caravan routes and

developed increasingly sophisticated business institutions. The most important early Han

institutions were merchant guilds (huiguan), which brought men from the same province

or locale together in new places. Guilds provided aid in purchasing and selling, organizing

caravans, and assessing local markets. For men who moved bulk goods over vast distances

by mule or horse, such institutions were valuable, and these institutions were arguably one

reason why Chinese dominated Sino-Southeast Asian trade routes in early modern times.51

The guild was not, however, the only crucial institution. By the early nineteenth century

at the latest, large-scale family firms (shanghao) emerged in south-west China. The earliest

in Yunnan were founded by men from the major caravan towns such as Heqing, Dali, and

Tengchong; an interesting parallel is found further east, in Guangxi Province, where the

early firms emerged from the Vietnam trade.52 In other words, long-distance trade spurred

on the creation of complex commercial organizations in the nineteenth century, and this

trend continued into the twentieth century. The Kham trade provides an excellent case for

understanding the increasing scale of merchant firms, many of which emerged from border-

land communities that were not dominated by Han Chinese. While Han and Hui traders

49 Oliver Coales, ‘Economic notes on eastern Tibet’, Geographical Journal, 54, 4, October 1919, p. 244.

50 Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s journey, pp. 106–7.

51 Giersch, Asian borderlands: the transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan frontier, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2006, ch. 6, esp. p. 184; idem, ‘Cotton’.

52 Luo Qun, Jindai Yunnan shangren yu shangren ziben (Modern Yunnanese merchants and merchantcapital), Kunming: Yunnan daxue, 2004, pp. 39–41; Gu Yongji, ‘Ming-Qing shi Dian Gui diqu yuYuenan guanxi shulun (Yunnan and Guangxi regions’ relations with Vietnam during the Ming and Qingperiods)’, Yunnan shifan daxue xuebao (Journal of Yunnan Normal University), 37, 2, 2005, p. 80.


could be found throughout Kham, there were also powerful Tibetan merchants, as well as

men from communities whose ethnic affiliations were more ambiguous. This is particularly

true for the merchants of Xizhou, who thought of themselves as Han but spoke a Tibeto-

Burman Bai dialect as their first language and were recognized by outsiders as minjia, a

non-Han people of north-west Yunnan whose descendents have largely been classified as

‘Bai’ by the Chinese state.53

Of the Han merchants who plied the Tibet and Kham trade, the Shaanxi (laoshaan) men

may have been the most ubiquitous. William Rockhill and Eric Teichmen, Westerners who

spoke Chinese and understood the nuances of China and Tibet, frequently reported on

Shaanxi traders. Shaanxi families could be found living in Ganzi (Garze), where they con-

trolled the local flour trade, or they might wander the grasslands, dressed as Tibetans, a tac-

tic that may have helped them to do business with nomads.54 The most powerful Shaanxi

firms dominated the tea trade, owning the tea-packing establishments (chafang) in Yazhou

and establishing branches in crucial trade towns throughout Kham. The tea firms not only

controlled the manufacture of brick tea but also managed the transportation and selling of

tea as far as Dajianlu, where the tea was sold to Tibetan merchants.55

Muslim Chinese were also deeply involved in the Kham trade, although, by the

later nineteenth century, Hui firms seem to have been better networked through Chengdu,

Songpan, and the northern routes to Qinghai and Gansu. Yang Bokang’s Qichang firm,

for instance, handled musk trade from Kham to Chengdu.56 Ma Zeru, who managed the

main office for the Hui-run Yuanxinchang firm, recalled how his firm engaged in trade

throughout Yunnan and Southeast Asia, but noted that it was north-west Yunnan’s Lijiang

and Xizhou merchants who handled musk purchases in Dajianlu.57

Lijiang and Xizhou merchants (along with Heqing merchants) had a tradition of leading

mule trains into Kham and Tibet. The geographic scale of their nineteenth-century trade

tended to be, by later standards, relatively small. Most caravans carried tea or textiles north

from Dali to Zhongdian or Atunzi, where they would sell to Tibetan traders.58 By the late

nineteenth century, they and other merchants began to extend their networks even further,

establishing permanent agents in the trade markets of Dajianlu, Jyekundo, Litang, Batang,

and Ganzi.59 In the twentieth century, a number of firms would develop the abilities to

operate on even greater geographical scales, including in Lhasa.

53 Francis Hsu found Xizhou inhabitants adamant about their Han identity, though they spoke Bai at home.After 1949, the state classified them as Bai. Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the ancestors’ shadow: Chineseculture and personality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949, pp. 18–19; Colin Mackerras, ‘Aspectsof Bai culture: change and continuity in a Yunnan nationality’, Modern China, 14, 1, 1988, p. 53.

54 Rockhill, Land, pp. 250–2; Eric Teichman, Travels of a consular official in eastern Tibet, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1922, pp. 76–7.

55 Rockhill, Land, pp. 277, 310–11; Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s journey, pp. 56–7.

56 Chengdu shi Yisilanjiao xiehui (The Chengdu City Islamic Association), ‘Huixun’, 22, p. 23, cited inDuan Jinlu and Yao Jide, eds., Zhongguo nanfang Huizu jingji shangmao ziliao xuanbian (SouthernChina Hui economics and trade: selected sources), Kunming: Yunnan minzu, 2002, p. 277.

57 Ma Zeru interview, cited in Duan and Yao, Zhongguo nanfang Huizu, p. 370.

58 Shen, ‘Dali Baizu mabang’, pp. 260–2.

59 Rockhill, Land, pp. 206–9; Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s journey, p. 104.


The Shaanxi and Yunnan firms that emerged in the late nineteenth century were not the

only powerful trade institutions. Tibetan Buddhist monasteries possessed considerable

power to manage trade. Monasteries controlled agricultural production, which provided

goods and revenue. Because of their control of goods and their relatively large populations,

they were also the sites for markets. In Kham, monasteries housed hundreds or even thou-

sands of monks and, like the fortified residences (dzong) of local hereditary elites, monaster-

ies attracted merchants.60

Litang’s monastery, for example, dominated the export of gold dust. Gold washers

working Litang’s streams produced about 2,000 ounces of gold per annum, all of which

was purchased by the monastery and sent to Dajianlu for export. In addition to controlling

the gold trade, the monks also worked closely with firms importing tea and exporting

sheep.61 The link between Chinese firms and monasteries was not unique to Litang. In

Batang, there were two firms acting as commercial agents for the local monastery.62 Such

connections represented crucial networking for each group. Chinese firms gained access to

locally produced goods and to credit in a region without banks. The monasteries extended

their interests beyond local landholding and moneylending, using their partners to monopol-

ize access to outside markets, thus limiting local herdsmen’s and gold-washers’ access to

export avenues. They also used the firms to purchase imports in Dajianlu that could be

sold in Kham. In Litang and Batang, therefore, most local peoples did not have the eco-

nomic agency that Scott envisions for other Zomian communities. Instead, commerce

enriched an established religio-political hierarchy. According to Hosie, ‘As at Litang, the

[Batang] trade is almost entirely in the hands of the lamas, who . . . dictate their terms to

the lay population. The lamaseries are gigantic trade concerns, and their practical monopoly

accounts to a great extent for their wealth’.63

While the Kham monasteries such as Litang and Batang developed networks with Chi-

nese firms to help them extend their commercial power, Lhasa-based monasteries and lay

merchants acted across longer distances. Monasteries sent monks to Dajianlu to act as pur-

chasing agents, and Tibetan companies, about which little is known, also stationed perman-

ent agents in Dajianlu.64 The agents organized purchases of tea and other goods that were

then shipped to Lhasa or Shigatze. Thus, Lhasa-based merchants developed far-reaching

networks – and not just to Kham: in 1891–92, Rockhill encountered Lhasa merchants

and their wives selling cloth, saffron, and medicines at the Kumbum monastery fair near

Xining.65

In building networks to Xining and Dajianlu, Lhasa merchants leveraged their connec-

tions to India, but they also relied on Khampa brokers whose lifestyles and livelihoods

depended on cross-cultural negotiating skills. During a careful investigation into Dajianlu’s

commerce, Coales found that

60 Van Spengen, Tibetan border worlds, pp. 70, 80.

61 Rockhill, Diary, p. 357.

62 Ibid., pp. 344–5.

63 Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s journey, pp. 122–3.

64 Ibid., p. 79; Rockhill, Land, pp. 284–5.

65 Rockhill, Diary, p. 67.


A merchant, say at Lhasa, wishing to purchase tea and silk, assembles a caravan of

ponies and mules and lades them with Tibetan goods, such as woolen cloth, rugs,

incense, foreign sundries from India, and gold and silver in bullion or coin. He pro-

ceeds to [Dajianlu] . . . Here he puts up at one of the [dzong] or [guozhuang]. These

are the houses of the local Tibetan gentry, who undertake to entertain the merchants

on condition of being their go-betweens and interpreters in dealing with the

Chinese.66

The guozhang were crucial for merchants from all backgrounds. These innkeepers were bro-

kers, interpreters, and creditors. They not only brought buyers and sellers together, taking a

4% commission for their troubles, but also arranged for packaging and transport of tea for

Tibetan merchants.67

The role of the broker was both culturally and economically central to the operation of

the Dajianlu trade, and his or her function (many guozhuang were women) mirrors that of

intermediaries on China’s other trade frontiers. In his study of wool, Millward noted how

Han merchants ‘function on the frontier only with the assistance of innkeepers who know

the local people and customs’.68 In Xining and various towns in Gansu, there were entire

families called xiejia who, like the guozhuang, were commercial liaisons who linked Han

and Hui merchants with Mongol and Tibetan producers. They provided interpreting ser-

vices that translated multiple business cultures, a crucial set of skills passed down from gen-

eration to generation.69 In Lijiang, the long-term resident Peter Goullart was befriended by

a female innkeeper whose work with Tibetan merchants required more than just providing a

business venue. She organized collective meals, brought in Khampa entertainers, and made

her clients – who were referred to her by a son in Lhasa – comfortable for stays that lasted

one or two months.70 She was, like all brokers, indispensable to the ongoing operation of

trade networks.

While merchants and brokers created trade networks, states were important actors, too.

To understand state roles requires some knowledge of Kham’s political geography. The

Qing extended its power into the area during the eighteenth century, but its soldiers and

influence were concentrated in the trading towns.71 As a result, political power was multi-

layered. While Qing officials and troops operated out of the major towns, local hereditary

rulers (called ‘native officials’ or tusi by the Qing) and monasteries held power elsewhere.

In Dajianlu, for instance, there were Qing officials and soldiers appointed by the Sichuan

provincial administration. There was also the powerful Chala Jyelbo, a hereditary Khampa

ruler who was recognized as the Mingzheng tusi. In other places, Lhasa’s Dalai Lama

regime exercised its influence. At Litang, for instance, there were Qing officials and soldiers,

66 Coales, ‘Economic notes’, pp. 244–5.

67 Clements, ‘Musk’; Coales, ‘Economic notes’, p. 245. Millward nicely describes the guozhuang’s role in‘Chinese border’, pp. 21–2.

68 Millward, ‘Chinese border’, p. 6.

69 Rockhill, Land, p. 51.

70 Peter Goullart, Forgotten kingdom, London: John Murray, 1955, pp. 46–8.

71 Xiuyu Wang, ‘China’s last imperial frontier: statecraft and locality in Qing Kham Tibet, 1890–1911’,PhD thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 2006, p. 73.


as well as a local tusi, but Lhasa maintained a level of influence through its appointment of

monastic leaders, who also happened to control local trade.72

This array of religious and lay officials, with their multiple connections to Kham, Lhasa,

and Beijing, made an impact on trade in a number of different ways. At Dajianlu, both Qing

officials and the local tusi benefited from the tea trade. Qing officials lined their pockets

with tax monies earned from tea imports. The Chala Jyelbo, meanwhile, taxed tea exports

to Tibet. But officials did more than tax commerce; some participated in it. Qing participa-

tion was linked to state control of transport labour and animals through the ula system,

which allowed officials to demand pack animals and porters to move goods. Officials could

make money either trading goods using subjects’ ula pack animals or by over-reporting the

numbers of animals used on official journeys and pocketing surplus expense money.73

The Lhasa government represented another layer of state involvement in trade. Its offi-

cials could also demand ula, and, like the Qing, they financed a system of lodging houses

on the routes into Kham. Along these routes travelled at least two annual government car-

avans, designed to purchase Sichuan silks.74 The caravan trade thus financed state activity,

and Lhasa’s support for it continued into the post-Qing period when Tibet operated under

de facto independence. In the post-war period, the focus shifted to Indian routes and, up un-

til 1951, Tibetan merchants exported millions of pounds of wool through India to the Uni-

ted States. After Chinese troops entered Tibet, the trade was terminated because of US

regulations against trading with communist nations.75

An analysis of Kham trade reveals how trade networks were often linked to state power.

Merchants sought alliances with monastic officials, some of whom were, like those in

Litang, appointed from Lhasa. Other officials, whether Qing or Tibetan, used their offices

as well as the infrastructure of protected routes and government lodging houses to engage

in trade themselves. The Qing state regulated and benefited from the tea trade, and the

Lhasa government arranged caravans to China or India, depending on the political situ-

ation. Throughout the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century,

state power in the Kham borderlands – whether exercised by local elites or emanating

from China or Tibet – remained multilayered, contested, and incomplete. Yet the movement

of goods, the building of merchant networks, and the exercise of power were still influenced

by states, and this, in turn, was linked to cultural developments.

In 1891, Rockhill arrived in Batang to find the Khampa deba (hereditary ruler) speaking

Chinese with a Sichuanese accent, and Khampa men about town wearing the queue, a hair-

style required of Qing China’s male subjects.76 The acquisition of new languages or changes

in personal appearance and everyday practice were common in Kham, yet they were also

complex and multidirectional. While local elites adopted some Chinese and Qing practices,

Chinese also learned Tibetan ways: Sichuanese peddlers, for example, became ‘thoroughly

72 For expert insight into Kham politics, see ibid., pp. 81–116. For Lhasa influence in Kham monasteries,see Rockhill, Diary, p. 359.

73 Rockhill, Land, pp. 52–3.

74 Sarat Chandra Das, Journey to Lhasa and central Tibet, London: John Murray, 1902, pp. 182–3, 193.

75 Melvyn C. Goldstein, A history of modern Tibet, volume 2: the calm before the storm, 1951–1955,Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 263–4.

76 Rockhill, Diary, pp. 346–7.


Tibetanized, in manners, in dress, and moreover in religion’, and, according to Rockhill, the

local Qing lieutenant stationed in Ganzi ‘conformed to the local religious observances – us-

ing a rosary, burning juniper boughs, dipping his finger in his wine or tea cup before drink-

ing’.77 In Zhongdian, a local Tibetan family now traces its ancestors back to Shaanxi’s

Muslim communities, suggesting that some of the family’s forebears migrated to engage

in the tea trade, and gradually abandoned Islamic practices.78 The merchants who plied

the grasslands searching out Tibetan customers adopted the language and dress of local

nomads without losing their skills in Chinese or their identification as laoshaan. And the

guozhuang families developed entire lifestyles around mediating between different merchant

communities. One way to explain such hybridity is to recognize that hierarchies of power

encouraged these developments. The Qing state’s and Chinese merchants’ prominence

encouraged local Tibetan elites to learn Chinese or wear the queue. Since political and eco-

nomic power was multilayered, however, Lhasa and local Khampa elites were also power-

holders in their own right – engaging in trade, providing credit through monasteries, and

selling musk and gold. Outsiders therefore adjusted to accommodate their ways, implying

that, although cultural development in Zomia might involve state-resisting tactics, as Scott

argues, the highlands were not always places in which culture or political organization was

shaped by refusal. Locals and migrants had to reckon with states and commercial networks,

and such reckoning sometimes meant acquiring new practices that allowed them to integrate

into those networks.

The ‘upscaling’ of Yunnan firms

The period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century brought

important changes to communities of Kham, south-west China, and Southeast Asia. At the

turn of the twentieth century, the British sought to extend power into Tibet, and Qing res-

istance led to modern state-building efforts in Kham and Lhasa. Several years later, in 1911–

12, the imperial government fell, sparking long-term confrontations over Tibet even as the

Dalai Lama regime developed a de facto independent government. The Second World

War, meanwhile, brought a new urgency to exploiting routes linking south-west China to

Burma and Tibet (the Burma Road was built at this time). While the political upheavals

are well known, the revolutionary commercial transformations are only now being

explored.79 In the face of dramatic change, Yunnan-based caravan operators established

an increasing number of more specialized firms. Some of the most powerful emerged from

north-west and south-west Yunnan, particularly the Heqing, Xizhou, and Tengchong areas,

although there were remarkable firms from other regions, notably Ma Qixiang’s Xing-

shunhe, with its roots in the Yuxi Muslim community.80 This article focuses on the Heqing,


78 Ma Jiakui, ‘Huiyi xianfu Ma Zhucai jingying Zhong-Yin maoyi (Recollections of my late father MaZhucai’s engagement in China–India trade)’, in Duan and Yao, Zhongguo nanfang Huizu, pp. 398–406.

79 See, for example, Zhou Zhisheng, Shangren yu jindai Zhongguo xinan bianjiang shehui (Merchants andmodern China’s south-western frontier society), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 2006.

80 Ma Yunhe, ‘Qingmo Huizu jushang Ma Qixiang (Ma Qixiang: a major Hui merchant in the late Qing)’,in Duan and Yao, Zhongguo nanfang Huizu, pp. 331–334.


Xizhou, and Tengchong firms as they increased their geographical reach. In the process,

these merchants built more complex businesses centred on south-west China but linking

Kham, India, Southeast Asia, and China’s great ports in networks of production, transporta-

tion, and consumption.

Like other Yunnan firms, Yongchangxiang had its origins in the regional caravan trade,

though its founders, the Yan family, also invested in real estate. The earliest extant family

contracts reveal eighteenth-century investments in buildings and land in the Xizhou and

Dali areas.81 By the 1940s, however, their commercial and real estate empire included silk

filatures in Sichuan, a tin refinery in Guangzhou, tin mining claims in Gejiu, and branch

operations in Tibet, Burma, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere.82 In tracking Yong-

changxiang’s (and other firms’) expansion, we can turn to corporate documents for clues

as to how they built and maintained their business networks.

Far from limiting their cooperation to relatives or fellow merchants from the same home-

town, the firms often sought out diverse business partners, a practice that many have denied

was a part of Chinese business culture until quite recent times.83 In moving into Mandalay for

instance, Yongchangxiang, which was run by men who spoke Bai as their first language, was

aided by Chinese-speaking Han traders from Tengchong.84 Particularly important to Yong-

changxiang were partnerships with the successful Tengchong firm Rongheng (Moh Heng).

In the 1930s, the two firms collaborated to create and manage the Yunnan-Burma Raw

Silk Company (Dian-Mian shengsi gongsi), with filatures in Sichuan and a transport and mar-

keting network that transported the silk through Yunnan to Rangoon.85 Yongchangxiang also

established other partnerships that allowed it operate in Shanghai and Hong Kong.86 In order

to operate on larger geographical scales, then, Yongchangxiang’s leaders sought capital and

partners from far beyond north-west Yunnan, the place of its origins.

New communications technology helped Yunnan firms to maintain contact with

branches around China and beyond. Like Yongchangxiang, the Tengchong firm Rongheng

had, by the 1940s, established branch offices in Tibet, Mandalay, Shanghai, and

Hong Kong. The international post office system and telegraph lines kept them in contact

with each other. Letters and telegrams were frequently exchanged between the central

office and the Lhasa branch (which handled the Tibet trade), the Sichuan branches (which

oversaw silk production), and the Burma branches (which handled imports and exports).

81 Yunnan Provincial Archives, Kunming, Yunnan siying jinchukou shang (Yunnanese privately managedimport–export firms) (henceforth YPA, YSJS), 132-4-99, Yongchangxiang de qiyue (Yongchangxiang’sdeeds), pp. 32–7.

82 YPA, YSJS, 132-4-99, pp. 8–17.

83 The allegedly closed nature of Chinese business networks has long been studied. For two recentdiscussions from different perspectives, see Sherman Cochran, Chinese medicine men: consumer culturein China and Southeast Asia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 5–7; Kris Oldsand Henry Wai-chung Yeung, ‘(Re)shaping ‘‘Chinese’’ business networks in a globalising era’,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17, 1999, pp. 535–55.

84 Shen, ‘Dali Baizu mabang’, p. 263.

85 YPA, YSJS, 132-3-1, Dian-Mian shengsi gongsi Sichuan caiban bu (Purchasing department of theYunnan–Burma Raw Silk Company), pp. 106–10 and 132 3–3, pp. 2–3.

86 YPA YSJS, 132-2-35, Yongchangxiang zongli Yan Xiecheng siren xin (Private letters of theYongchangxiang director Yan Xiecheng), pp. 38–9, 95.


These communications, moreover, were systematically numbered, allowing the company’s

manager, Wang Youxi, to track rapid changes in areas of interest to the firm: cotton textile

pricing, raw silk purchasing, and Tibetan politics. Once the Burma Road was built, more-

over, he could also monitor shipments from Burma, which now came via Rongheng’s motor

vehicle pool as well as by pack animal.87

Like Rongheng, Yongchangxiang developed sophisticated reporting procedures that

allowed its branches to communicate with the central office by mail and telegraph. For

Yongchangxiang, the communications revolution was not limited to distance-defeating

technologies of transmission; it also included changes in the contents of communication.

The firm’s first accountant, Su Yongjiu, had, like many top north-western businessmen,

been apprenticed in a Heqing firm. At the time, Heqing firms were known for developing

new accounting and communications procedures. These innovations, which were diffused

to other areas when men such as Su were hired away, helped Yongchangxiang keep closer

track of cash flow, profits and losses, and commodities.88 Such practices allowed Yong-

changxiang’s general manager, Yan Xiecheng, to oversee silk production in Sichuan and

to manage shipments of Gejiu tin to his Guangzhou refining factory.89 In order to act at

greater distances than ever before, the firms used traditional practices of placing representa-

tives (often family members) in far-flung hubs, but they also adapted to create new types of

partnerships and to use new communications technologies.

While new technologies, partnerships, and the ability to ‘act at a distance’ represented

important transformations of the caravan firms, some things did not change. Many firms con-

tinued to profit from the Kham trade, and this still required the use of pack trains. Throughout

the 1930s and into the wartime and post-war periods, the Heqing firm of Hengshenggong

maintained branches at Atunzi and Dajianlu. These branches frequently shipped goods via

Lijiang to Kunming and beyond. To do so, they contracted with individual caravan companies

and their leaders (ma guotou). Judging from eight extant contracts from the 1940s, Heng-

shenggong did business with a number of caravan companies, some of them run by men

with Chinese names, some by men with Tibetan names.90 As with Yongchangxiang and

Rongheng, ethnicity did not seem to be a barrier to cooperation in business.

While the firms that developed from the Yunnan caravan trade concerns made their

merchant-owners wealthy, it is less clear how Tibetan businesses fared. From 1904 onwards,

Tibet and Kham experienced frequent political upheavals, and monasteries in particular were

placed under pressure. The British invasion of Tibet (1903–04) sparked violent Qing state-

building initiatives in its Inner Asian frontier regions.91 In Kham regions where tusi held power,

the Qing replaced them with Han officials. In regions where Tibetan Buddhist monastic

87 YPA YSJS ,132-2-10.

88 The dissemination of accounting and communications practices can be deduced from Jie, ‘Qingzhengyushanghao’, pp. 28–9; Yang Kecheng, ‘Yongchangxiang jianshi (A basic history of Yongchangxiang)’, inYunnan wenshi, vol. 9, pp. 50–2; and Shi Cilu, ‘Fuchunheng de xingqi fazhan ji qi yanluo (The origin,development, and decline of Fuchungheng)’, in Yunnan wenshi, vol. 8, pp. 3–23.

89 YPA, YSJS, 132-2-35, pp. 87–8.

90 YPA, YSJS, 132-4-71 Hengsheng Lijiang zhuang suoshou gehuo qingce (Inventory of sales fromHengsheng’s Lijiang branch), pp. 43–51.

91 Giersch, ‘‘‘Grieving for Tibet’’: conceiving the modern state in late-Qing Inner Asia’, China Perspectives,3, 2008, pp. 4–18.


authority was strong, the Qing banned monastic participation in government affairs; monaster-

ies suspected of anti-Qing activities were stripped of their lands.92 These developments were

only the beginning of ongoing struggles between Khampas, various Chinese states, and Lhasa.

Once the Qing fell in 1912, the struggles over who controlled the former imperial territories

continued, with occasional fighting breaking out between Chinese and Tibetan troops.

How did these changes affect commercial networks? Some argued that the political

instability changed the economic balance of power in Kham in favour of Chinese.93 The

transformation of the Yunnan companies certainly reinforces the view that China-based

merchants (though not necessarily ethnic Chinese) were developing the institutions and geo-

graphical reach to gain greater control over the Kham economy. Other observers disagreed.

Although the Qing removed hereditary Khampa leaders from power in 1905, in some cases

the former tusi succeeded in trade. Merchants from the Hor states around Ganzi, for

instance, took control of the Lhasa tea trade.94 Even as the Yunnan firms expanded their

networks into Kham, Coales found them providing new opportunities for Khampas and

Figure 1. States, provinces, and cities mentioned in the text. Sources: ESRI Data & Maps

[CD-ROM], (2009). Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute. Available:

Wellesley College Library. CHGIS Data [CD-ROM], version 1.0. (2002). Cambridge,

MA: Harvard Yenching Institute.

92 Wang, ‘China’s last’, pp. 118–19, 127, 188–202, 210–12.

93 Francis Kingdon Ward, The land of the blue poppy: travels of a naturalist in eastern Tibet, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1913, p. 59.

94 Oliver Coales, ‘Economic notes’, p. 235.


Tibetans, who now had outside firms competing to do business with them.95 Meanwhile,

Lhasa-based merchants continued to benefit from the India trade. This was particularly

true during China’s anti-Japan war (1937–45), when eastern China’s ports and, later,

Burma, came under Japanese control, providing merchants and the Tibetan government

with unique opportunities to invest in the India–China trade.96 While there is not yet an

easy answer to how the fluid politics and emerging international markets affected Khampa

and Tibetan merchants in the twentieth century, it is possible to begin to propose some con-

clusions about trade networks and their impacts on Zomian communities.

Inclusion, exclusion, and the promise of processgeographies

From the eighteenth century until the 1940s, merchants and states created the means to

routinely conduct business in parts of ‘Zomia’, including Kham. Recreating this past as a

Figure 2. Kham regions and towns mentioned in the text. Sources: ESRI Data & Maps [CD-

ROM], (2009). Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute. Available: Well-

esley College Library. CHGIS Data [CD-ROM], version 1.0. (2002). Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard Yenching Institute.

95 Ibid., p. 245.

96 Goullart witnessed the Tibet caravans come through Lijiang: Forgotten kingdom, pp. 86–7.


narrative of networks reveals a number of insights. First, the movement of goods and people

across Kham and the commodification of its resources is not a simple story of exploitation,

nor can it be understood only in terms of Zomian agency and freedom. Second, trade net-

works, constructed by merchants and states, connected Kham to East Asian metropolises,

such as Hong Kong and Shanghai, and to Southeast Asian ports, such as Haiphong and

Rangoon. In examining the flows of goods and people, as well as the expanding scales on

which merchants operated, we can see the production of a space that might be called Zomia

(though it could also be called something else). Third, the creation of these networks

demonstrated the power of states and merchants to ‘act at a distance’ in Kham; thus, we

must be careful in how we portray the relationship between Zomia’s highlanders and the

valley states and peoples that surrounded them.

The movement of goods and people across Kham is not a simple story of exploitation,

whether of indigenous peoples by Qing officials and Han or of Chinese and Tibetans by

European imperialists. This is not to say that power and exploitation were absent; however,

the people who built networks of trade emerged from a variety of backgrounds. They were

Qing or Tibetan officials, relying on their office and control over ula. They were Khampa

hereditary elites with broad powers to impose trade taxes or the connections to build trade

empires. They were Han Chinese and minjia traders, who drew from knowledge of caravan

routes to transform the scale on which their operations worked. To do so, they incorporated

new technologies of communication, re-engineered their firms to take advantage of

improved accounting practices, and developed new partnerships. Most peripherally of all,

though still crucial, they were European companies, established in Shanghai, Hong Kong,

Rangoon, and Haiphong, representing the growing global demand for wool, musk, and tin.

The creation of trade networks therefore included an interesting range of participants. Of

course, to focus on those who were included begs the question of exclusion. Earlier histories

of China’s borderlands focused on how Han economic penetration impoverished indigenous

peoples. The easy answer to exclusion was local (non-Chinese) peoples. Recent work, includ-

ing Millward’s on Qinghai and Gansu, acknowledges much truth in the easy answer, but

questions its simplicity and universality.97 Zhou Zhisheng reinforces Millward’s scepticism

by revealing how non-Han merchants from Yunnan’s north-western towns created firms

that participated in the expanding long-distance trade.98 Scott goes further in suggesting

that highland peoples manipulated trade relations for themselves. In tracing the origins of

Yongchangxiang, this article tentatively confirms Zhou’s findings and demonstrates that

firms formed by men who spoke Chinese as a second language cooperated with Han firms

in their mutual efforts to extend the scale and profitability of their business empires. It also

reveals that Khampa merchants, Tibetan caravan companies, and brokers who specialized

in cross-cultural deals found niches in the twentieth-century transformations. Nevertheless,

it is still unclear how certain merchants, especially those from Xizhou, self-identified, sug-

gesting that future studies must adopt more sophisticated approaches to identity.

The story of exclusion, moreover, requires significant attention beyond this article’s

scope, but there are some tentative points to be made. Litang’s monastery, which controlled

97 Millward, ‘Chinese border’, p. 13.

98 Zhou, Shangren yu jindai Zhongguo.


the local gold trade, prevented prospectors from mining gold, which may have led to more

profits and autonomy for miners. The policies channelled prospectors into gold-washing,

resulting in small-scale, scattered operations, which were controlled to maximize the mon-

astery’s profit. Similarly, merchants who plied remote regions often established monopso-

nies, buying cheaply the goods that might be sold dear in market towns. Those who lived

far from trade routes had fewer options for selling their products. Nineteenth-century obser-

vers recognized this: Rockhill learned from French missionaries that Yunnanese merchants

exploited the Lisu groups with whom they traded.99 The practices of usury and monopsony

were, in fact, well-established Han processes for gaining advantage over borderlands peo-

ples.100 In the case of Kham, the exploitative practices of ula were an additional method

for creating boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Those with contacts in the markets,

access to capital, or coercive power over transport labour might enrich themselves by using

others to gather musk or to transport profitable goods. Many were excluded from such

practices, and their exclusion demonstrates a lack of control over their place in expanding

commerce dominated by merchant networks, local elites, and state representatives from

Tibet or China.

The excluded were not entirely powerless, however. As Scott would predict, local peo-

ples sometimes refused ula extractions. Rockhill noticed that Tibetans often refused ula to

Qing officials, but stopped short of claiming that this was some sort of triumph. In fact,

he concluded that ula services were still quite oppressive.101 Organized banditry was

another response to exclusion. Although the Tibetan and Chinese states stationed troops

along trade routes, they could not control all territories. The lands around Batang, for

instance, were particularly notorious for their brigands.102 Teichman also found the grass-

lands north of Ganzi to be an uncontrolled region, where predation on trade caravans

became part of life.103

These brief accounts suggest that Zomia included peoples who resisted states, plundered

trade routes, and organized themselves in ways to enhance their autonomy. But people also

adopted new practices out of a desire to participate in, not shun or hijack, networks of

power or wealth. From the eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century, power

in Zomia was not exercised through the institutions of modern nation-states but empires

and local regimes were able to extend their limited reach into certain areas. In Kham, the

Qing and Tibetan states provided moderately safe trade routes, and those who benefited

included local elites, such as the Khampa rulers of Chala or the monastic leaders in Litang.

Even in eras before the arrival of nation-states, it is therefore difficult to separate political

power from economic or cultural transformations. This explains why some locals began

to adhere to certain Chinese and Qing practices: speaking Chinese, adopting the queue,

or, in the case of monasteries, seeking Chinese merchant-partners. These changes suggest

that networks, whether state or commercial, influenced behaviour, and thus we also find


100 Giersch, Asian borderlands, pp. 143–4, 165.

101 Rockhill, Diary, pp. 336–7.

102 Ibid., pp. 328–9.

103 Teichman, Travels, p. 77.


Chinese adopting Tibetan ways. The hybridity found throughout Kham can be explained, in

part, as responses to the multilayered networks of power that were constructed throughout

these regions – a pattern replicated elsewhere.

In the Sino-Southeast Asian borderlands, for instance, Tai and highlanders acculturated

to Han Chinese ways just as Akha, Hani, and Kachin highlanders adapted Tai practices.

The most compelling explanation for this lies in their efforts to maximize opportunities to

integrate themselves into changing political and commercial situations controlled by others.

In other words, people adopted the practices of others because those practices proved bene-

ficial; they were beneficial because others had power and wealth. Such an understanding

of acculturation relies on arguments introduced by John Shepherd for eighteenth-century

Taiwan, but it is also compelling for assessing the complex and multidirectional cultural

changes elsewhere, including the areas (and changes) charted by Edmund Leach in his clas-

sic Political systems of highland Burma.104 Zomia was not always a place in which culture

or political organization was shaped by refusal.

In emphasizing the production of new spatial connections, rather than stressing static

trait geographies, this article implicitly engages other works employing process geography.

In recent reviews of Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian studies, both Clare Anderson and

Markus Vink have lauded work ‘in which regions can be conceptualized as both dynamic

and interconnected’.105 The advantages of doing so are revealed in studies such as Eric

Tagliacozzo’s Secret trades, porous borders, which examines the dynamics of colonial

state-building in response to the mobile, waterborne peoples and commodities of insular

Southeast Asia. According to Tagliacozzo, we cannot understand how the colonial states

demarcated borders or developed new technologies for frontier control without examining

how they conceived of mobile people and smuggling ‘along a three-thousand-kilometer

stretch of land and sea in colonial Southeast Asia’.106 For colonial regimes in Batavia and

Singapore, the act of conceiving and then demarcating the frontier was a contingent – not

a premeditated – process. Premeditation was impossible because local peoples helped define

the evolving geographies of state and technologies of control through their efforts at evasion.

Tagliacozzo’s work demands investigation into how states and other institutions both

conceive of space and develop responses to dynamic networks of mobile, connected popula-

tions. In other words, it demonstrates the importance of applying process geography meth-

ods across a wide span of geographical scales and time periods, and his insights provide a

possible next step for studies of Zomia and other dynamic regions: to explore the histories

of how nation-state space was imagined and then, through contingent policies, enforced in

ways that engulfed, perhaps only temporarily, the networks of alternative geographies.

104 Giersch, Asian borderlands, pp. 189–99; John R. Shepherd, Statecraft and political economy on theTaiwan frontier, 1600–1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 362–3, 377; Edmund R.Leach, Political systems of highland Burma: a study of Kachin social structure, London: G. Bell and Sons,1954.

105 Quote from Vink, ‘Indian Ocean studies’, p. 52; see also Clare Anderson, ‘‘‘Process geographies’’ ofmobility and movement in the Indian Ocean: a review essay’, Journal of Colonialism and ColonialHistory, 8, 3, 2007, http://muse.uq.edu.au/login?uri¼/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v008/8.3anderson.html (consulted 30 March 2010).

106 Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret trades, porous borders: smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier,1865–1915, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 362.


http://muse.uq.edu.au/login?uri

It is easy to speculate that, in the late 1940s, Yan Xiecheng of Yongchangxiang and

Wang Youxi of Rongheng imagined their future to lie in the colonial ports where their

jointly funded Yunnan-Burma Raw Silk Company exported its products. For these men,

the geographical scales of operation and kinship included south-west China, Southeast

Asia, India, and, of course, Kham. But their activities, networks, and even lifestyles (Yan

sent his son to Europe in 1934 and built a villa on the shores of Erhai Lake with materials

imported from India via Tibet!) were simultaneously at odds with a different type of ‘pro-

duction of space’, namely the imagined geography of the nation being created by Chinese

urban elites.107 From the 1890s onwards, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries used new

media outlets to create and then imbue with emotion the imagined geography of an

embattled China. As British and French interests threatened Tibet and Yunnan, newspaper

accounts recast these peripheral lands as integral to the national body. In fact, the meta-

phors of the past – which identified these places as ‘wastelands’ – were replaced in the

1900s by more intimate images: China was a traditional courtyard house threatened by ban-

dits or a body afflicted with illness. Borderland places such as Tibet were the courtyard

walls, which needed strengthening to keep the bandits out.108 These intimate metaphors

were designed to help Chinese readers imagine frontiers as integral to their own lives, but

they also served to create powerful discourses of a China that must be defended and,

perhaps, walled off from the outside world.109

During the complex machinations of the Chinese Revolution, anti-colonial and nation-

building efforts in Southeast Asia, and the Cold War and its conflicts in Southeast Asia,

the new revolutionary China sought, at times, to do just that, and the merchant networks

that had connected south-west China to Kham, Southeast Asia, and India were destroyed.

These political changes, combined with the rise of national geography, helped – until quite

recently – to erase even the perception of pre-existing institutions for linking these regions.

This was true for Chinese and for others, and the post-war intellectual world built the insti-

tutional and conceptual barriers that would structure contemporary Area Studies, which

worked to erase the existence of Zomia.

Pat Giersch is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massa-

chusetts. He is the author of Asian borderlands (2006) and is currently working on the

issues of trade, geography, and inequality in south-west China.

107 For Yan’s lifestyle and his son’s travels, see Yang Kecheng, ‘Yongchangxiang jianshi’, pp. 56–7.

108 Rong Sheng, ‘Jingying Meng Zang yi baozun Zhongguo lun (shang) (Managing Mongolia and Tibet inorder to preserve China)’, (Tokyo) Da tong bao (Da tong newspaper), 7, 28 June 1908, in Lu Xiuzhang,ed., Qingmo Minchu Zang shi ziliao xuanbian 1877–1919 (Selected sources on Tibetan affairs during thelate Qing and early Republic, 1877–1919), Beijing: Zhongguo Zangxue, 2005, pp. 48–64.

109 I cover the origins of modern Chinese images of Tibet in ‘Grieving’, pp. 15–17.


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