Qing China's reluctant subjects: Indigenous communities and empire along the Yunnan frontier

The dissertation explores eighteenth-century political and demographic expansion along Qing China's southwestern frontier, focusing on the region now bisected by the modern border between Yunnan Province and Burma. The project addresses two weaknesses in previous Qing frontier studies. First, Western scholars have generally lacked access to indigenous viewpoints and have therefore evaluated expansion primarily from an imperial perspective. Second, Chinese scholars have used indigenous sources to reinforce interpretations which legitimate modern China's rule over its minorities. Using chronicles written by Tai-speakers indigenous to Yunnan's frontier in addition to Qing archives, I reassess frontier society. To explain this diverse society, I invoke the concept of "middle ground," an idea developed by Richard White to analyze relations between Europeans and indigenes in frontier North America.;A middle ground evolves when no group can dominate a given territory. In the 1720s, the Qing state deployed troops to occupy frontier Yunnan, but could not fully dominate sophisticated Tai communities located there. The Qing therefore withdrew most of their troops and turned to negotiating indirect rule through Tai aristocrats. This was the beginning of the middle ground. As Tai and Qing adjusted to the new relationship, each group modified its understanding of the other. Qing officials justified the partnership by portraying the Tai as acceptable "barbarians," while Tai aristocrats downplayed their subservience and emphasized the benefits of accommodation. These findings challenge earlier studies overstating Qing ability to conquer and incorporate frontier communities. Concurrent to the development of tenuous Sino-Tai political understandings, Han Chinese immigrants moved into the region. They traded and intermarried with indigenes; many immigrants adopted indigenous customs, but cultural borrowing went both ways since this social middle ground was a fluid society based on malleable identities and inter-ethnic exchange. My findings suggest that previous assumptions about Han culture's power to transform all it contacted are wrong. Qing officials renewed efforts to subjugate Tai domains in the 1770s, but failed once more, and the middle ground hallmarks of negotiation and accommodation remained defining features of the Yunnan frontier throughout the imperial period.