Paper long abstract:

Owen Lattimore claimed in his classic study of the frontiers of China that an agricultural-pastoral divide in north China originated with the rise of the Xiongnu starting in the late Warring States period (475-221 BC) and continuing up into the Mongol conquest of the 13th century. Since Lattimore, studies of the pre-modern economy of East Asia have tended to follow the common trope that an almost tangible boundary between plain and steppe in North China divided the intensive, sedentary agrarian world of Han civilization from the extensive, pastoral world of the "barbarian" steppe. Scholars have admitted the apparent existence of an intermediary zone in which people practiced varying mixtures of agriculture, gathering, hunting, and pastoralism, but little work has been done to quantify these practices or understand the people and how they were administered. In this paper, I explore land usage in the modern-day Hebei-Liaoning-Inner Mongolia borderland under Liao (907-1125) and Jin (1125-1234) dynasty administration in order to demonstrate the existence of an intermediary zone of mixed economic production between intensive agriculture in the south and extensive pastoralism in the north. During the Liao-Jin period, the region was inhabited by a mixture of different cultural groups including Han and Kitan—traditionally considered to be agricultural and pastoral respectively—however another Mongolic group, the Qai (known in Chinese sources as the Kumo Xi or Xi), are recorded as both tilling the land and raising livestock. Rather than focus on the political or cultural boundaries between empires, mapping the geographic distribution and understanding the administration of subject groups within the Liao and Jin reveals the presence of mixed land usage well beyond the border between Han and their northern neighbors in what is now northern portion of modern-day Hebei. Tracing the evolution of the administration of the Qai provides a first step towards a reevaluation of land usage in the region. Demonstration of the existence of an intermediary zone of semi-agricultural production outside of the traditional realm of Han Chinese, or "sinic space" as termed by Nicolas Tackett, problematizes our understanding of ecology, economy, and even ethnicity in north Asia.