BETWEEN the INTERIOR and FRONTIER the Jinsha River, One
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CHAPTER SIX BETWEEN THE INTERIOR AND FRONTIER The Jinsha River, one of the three rivers that constituted the tradi- tional border between the Yunnan interior and frontier, winds along the western and southern perimeters of present day Yongsheng county, an imperial prefecture. To the rulers of Nanzhao, this was beifang tan, or the ‘Northern Plain’ (Yongshengxianzhi bianweihui 1989, 31). To the succeeding Dali Kingdom, Yongsheng was the ‘Northern Gate.’ The three crossing points on the Jinsha River—Jinjiang in the south, Zili and Zhongjiang in the west—placed Yongsheng in a strategic posi- tion, both militarily and in terms of trade. On his way to conquering Dali, Khubilai named the place Beisheng (‘Northern Triumph’) to commemorate his victory (Li Wei 1990, 73). Following the pacifi cation of Yunnan by the Ming army, a garrison guard was deployed here to keep the peace. In the succeeding dynasty, Yongsheng was a stop on the famed tea-horse route connecting the interior of Yunnan with Tibet. The twilight days of the Qing dynasty saw the embattlement of Muslim rebels on the border, and the area continued to be a holdout of warlords throughout the Republican period. During the successive dynastic transitions the local state evolved from initially a military deployment to a more complex bureaucracy. The political geography of Yongsheng is key to the special admin- istrative status that history came to assign to it. The expansion and contraction of its jurisdiction and the evolution of the local state appa- ratus in this buffer zone refl ect a chain of political transformations on the frontier in the past centuries. From the Ming dynasty throughout the Republican period, present-day Yongsheng remained a center of political power as well as a major strategic point of military defense between the frontier (Kham in the north) and the interior (Dali in the south). The boom of the mining industry and the development of trade between Tibet and Yunnan during the Qing dynasty stimulated the local economy and population growth. Popular religion fl ourished along with the emergence of public schools. Tranquility was, however, always transitory. The modern history of Yongsheng saw disorder and restoration, revolution, and development, in the course of which the GUO_f8_265-310.indd 265 3/12/2008 3:55:37 PM 266 chapter six local state apparatus grew complex and increasingly infl uential in the lives of the local populace. Present-day Yongsheng has an area of proximately 5,000 square kilometers, which is barely half of its historical territory. With the even- tual separation of Ninglang (Langqu and Yongning) in the north and Huaping in the east, Yongsheng no longer shares border with Sichuan province and the historical Kham. A quarter of the county’s territory consists of fertile basins, mainly distributed across Chenghai, shielded by two mountain ranges: Dongshan and Xishan. The rugged terrain is home to some 380,000 people (2000), of which a majority make a living from agriculture. In contrast to the destitute frontier in the north, Yongsheng is a land of plenty but pales inevitably by comparison with the affl uent provincial interior in the south. In this buffer zone, economic reform has in recent decades taken its own course. Like the political transformation in the past, economic change in Yongsheng today is a result of local adaptation to national level policy-making that offers different solutions to development in the interior and frontier. 6.1 Evolution of the Local State The earliest record of the local chieftainship in Yongsheng dates from the Yuan, and the appointed chieftains bore the names Gao, Zi, and Zhang, respectively. The Gao family originated from Dali, and extended its power northward at the turn of the fi rst millennium as the result of intensifi ed power struggles in the south. The area dominated by the Gao family was roughly to the south and east of Chenghai; the territory in the north and west of Chenghai was under the jurisdic- tion of the indigenous ruler Zi whose subjects were largely Shuitian Lo-Lo (Yongshengxianzhi bianweihui 1989, 662–63).1 A small territory in the north, adjacent to the realm ruled by the Mu King of Lijiang, was controlled by the Zhang chieftain, a Naxi enfeoffed in reward for assisting the Mongol conquest of Dali.2 Both Gao and Zhang had 1 Some ten thousand people bear the surname Zi in Yongsheng today, the majority of who claim to be Han from Hunan. Some research has established that the Zi ancestors originally came from the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, and moved to the present settlement upon the unifi cation of the Qin (Li Wei 1990, 35). 2 He is believed to have been accorded a Mongolian name Zhan ji Temür (Yongshengxianzhi bianweihui 1989, 683), which became Zhang in Chinese. It is also GUO_f8_265-310.indd 266 3/12/2008 3:55:38 PM.