Cover image for A world trimmed with fur : wild things, pristine places, and the natural fringes of Qing
A world trimmed with fur : wild things, pristine places, and the natural fringes of Qing
Title:
A world trimmed with fur : wild things, pristine places, and the natural fringes of Qing

A world trimmed with fur : wild things, pristine places, and the natural fringes of Qing rule.
Author:
Schlesinger, Jonathan, author.
ISBN:
9780804799966
Physical Description:
xii, 271 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
Contents:
The view from Beijing -- Pearl thieves and perfect order -- The mushroom crisis -- Nature in the land of fur.
Abstract:
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.
Cover Title:
A world trimmed with fur : wild things, pristine places, and the natural fringes of Qing rule.
Bibliographical References:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-258) and index.
Field 805:
npmlib 10902741 DS754.12 S35 ysh
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