Paper long abstract:

When the disparate records of enfeoffment to Mongol aristocrats in the Yuan History 元史 are pieced together, vast estates emerge into view. Chief among them was the estate put under the control of the Chinggis Qan shrine. The shrine itself survived until 1959 in the form of eight white gers housing the relics from the eponymous state founder. This and other shrines also have transmitted texts in the forms of instructions for the rituals as well as the prayers. The estates reconstructed from the contents of these texts and evidence from the Yuan History are characterized by a distribution of agricultural and pastoral enterprises indiscriminate of the ethnicity of either the managers or the employees. Neither is the location of these estates of much consideration — the Han were assigned to pastoral estates as much as Mongols and immigrants from the Western part of the empire given agricultural duties. This is quite contrary to the assumption in our time — as well as many historical eras — that Mongols nomadize in Mongolia, and the Chinese cultivate in China. In this paper, I will discuss the results from tracing the movement of people, commodities, and money in relation to the Chinggis Qan shrine, and thereby argue that, in the absence of a preoccupation with matching ethnicity to "modes of production," the ecological features of each region was exploited with the goal of achieving optimal efficiency. The Yuan-era patterns of resource exploitation provides a wealth of data that can be compared to land-use patterns of later periods, and thus forms a "base-line" for understanding the effects of ethnic identity on land-use.