Tea Zomia Global History

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

doi:10.1017/S1740022810000069
Across Zomia with merchants,

monks, and musk: process
geographies, trade networks, and
the Inner-East–Southeast Asian
borderlands*
C. Patterson Giersch
History Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA
E-mail: cgiersch@wellesley.edu
Abstract
For 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 by
funding from the Wellesley College Dean’s Office. I am grateful to my NCH and History Department
colleagues for critical feedback. I thank Jean Michaud for inviting me to join this well-orchestrated
enterprise. I also thank the editors and two anonymous readers for graciously providing insightful and
constructive suggestions.
1 Henri Lefebvre, The production of space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; Neil
Smith, Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space, New York: Blackwell, 1984.
215
j
216 j C . P A T T E R S O N G I E R S C H
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 Philip
II, trans. Siân 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 Mediterranean
analogy’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34, 1, 2003, pp. 1–20; Wim van Spengen, Tibetan border
worlds: 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 Southeast
Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 6, 2002, p. 10; Jean Michaud, Historical
dictionary 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 historical
geography of spatial scales’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16, 1998, p. 462.
j
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 j 217
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 Morris
Rossabi, 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 political
life and times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, p. 9.
j
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, territories
and scales: towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy’, Global Networks: A
Journal 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, New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. x, 8; see also James C. Scott, ‘Zomia as a ‘‘state-repelling
space’’’, unpublished paper for Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA, 3–6 April
2008, pp. 14–16, 33–4.
j
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.
j
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 of
the 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 maoyi
tongdao tanxi (An investigation into China–Vietnam trade routes during the Qing dynasty)’, Guangxi
Difangzhi (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 the
impact of Shaanxi merchants on the opening of ‘‘north-west–south-west’’ Han–Tibetan trade)’, Xinan
minzu xueyuan xuebao, zhexue shuhui kexue ban (Journal of the Southwest Nationalities Institute,
philosophy and social sciences edition), 19, 4, 1998, p. 44.
j
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 Lê Quý
Ðôn’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 and
networks’ 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, ‘The
Qing state, merchants, and the military labor force in the Jinchuan campaigns’, Late Imperial China, 22,
2, 2001, pp. 37–40.
j
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 to
Burmah, London: John Murray, 1880, vol. 2, p. 125; William Woodville Rockhill, Diary of a journey
through 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, His
Majesty’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 (revised
1999), http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/millwarj/#WEB-PUBLISHED_ARTICLES (consulted
14 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.
j
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, Deqên) 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 of
the Dali Bai nationality’s caravan and commercial groups)’, in Na Qi, ed., Zhongguo Xinan wenhua
yanjiu (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 and
Tibet, 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; Chiranan
Prasertkul, Yunnan trade in the nineteenth century: southwest China’s cross-boundaries functional
system, Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 1989, p. 51; Jie Lesan,
‘Qingzhengyu shanghao huiyi lu (Recollections of the Qingzhengyu business firm)’, in Zhongguo renmin
zhengzhi xieshanghuiyi Yunnansheng weiyuanhui, wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Yunnan wenshi ziliao
xuanji (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 Yun
mountain range and Jinsha river: Yunnan nationalities’ trade), Kunming: Yunnan jiaoyu, 2000, pp. 70–1.
j
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-tsé 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 Ta
Li, 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 and
the 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 million
lb through Dajianlu alone, with another million lb each via Lijiang and Songpan; Hosie estimated
over 11 million lb through Dajianlu. See C. H. Desgodins, La mission du Thibet de 1855 à 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, 7
September 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 of
musk 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 of
perfumes, 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 Hong
Kong: 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).
j
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 Maritime
Customs, Returns of trade and trade reports for the year 1889, Shanghai: Statistical Department of
the 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 Giráldez,
including ‘Cycles of silver: global economic unity through the mid-eighteenth century,’ Journal of
World History, 13, 2, 2002, pp. 391–427.
j
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 merchant
capital), Kunming: Yunnan daxue, 2004, pp. 39–41; Gu Yongji, ‘Ming-Qing shi Dian Gui diqu yu
Yuenan guanxi shulun (Yunnan and Guangxi regions’ relations with Vietnam during the Ming and Qing
periods)’, Yunnan shifan daxue xuebao (Journal of Yunnan Normal University), 37, 2, 2005, p. 80.
j
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: Chinese
culture and personality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949, pp. 18–19; Colin Mackerras, ‘Aspects
of 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 in
Duan Jinlu and Yao Jide, eds., Zhongguo nanfang Huizu jingji shangmao ziliao xuanbian (Southern
China 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.
j
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.
j
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.
j
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.
j
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 Ma
Zhucai’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 and
modern 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.
j
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 managed
import–export firms) (henceforth YPA, YSJS), 132-4-99, Yongchangxiang de qiyue (Yongchangxiang’s
deeds), 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 recent
discussions from different perspectives, see Sherman Cochran, Chinese medicine men: consumer culture
in China and Southeast Asia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 5–7; Kris Olds
and 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 the
Yunnan–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 the
Yongchangxiang director Yan Xiecheng), pp. 38–9, 95.
j
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, ‘Qingzhengyu
shanghao’, pp. 28–9; Yang Kecheng, ‘Yongchangxiang jianshi (A basic history of Yongchangxiang)’, in
Yunnan 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 from
Hengsheng’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.
j
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.
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
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.
j
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.
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 process

geographies
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
95 Ibid., p. 245.
96 Goullart witnessed the Tibet caravans come through Lijiang: Forgotten kingdom, pp. 86–7.
j
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.
j
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.
j
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 the
Taiwan 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’’ of
mobility and movement in the Indian Ocean: a review essay’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial
History, 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.
j
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 in
order 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 the
late 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.

Tea Zomia Global History

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Tea Zomia Global History

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Journal of Global History (2010) 5, pp.

215–239 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2010

Across Zomia with merchants,

‘Zomia’ and process geographies

14 Scott, Art, pp. 4–5, 11.

A brief history of trans-Zomia trade

27 Dai, ‘Qing state’, pp. 79–80.

Trade routes and goods

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

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

Merchants, monks, brokers, and officials

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

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

The ‘upscaling’ of Yunnan firms

77 Rockhill, Land, pp. 256–8.

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

87 YPA YSJS ,132-2-10.

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

Inclusion, exclusion, and the promise of process

97 Millward, ‘Chinese border’, p. 13.

99 Rockhill, Land, pp. 284–5.

Pat Giersch is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massa-

You might also like