Blocking the Path of Feral Pigs with Rotten Bamboo: The Role of Upland Peoples in the Crisis of a Tay Polity in Southwest Yunnan, 1792 to 1836

Abstract

I Introduction 1)Photo 1 shows two young Jingpo and Tay women clasping hands and chatting cheerfully sometime during the 1950s. The caption reads: the past, the conflict between the Jingpo and the Tay ethnic groups was excessive, but now they cordially practice mutual self-criticism and cooperate closely together. The words eulogize the triumph of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in putting an end to over 150 years of intermittent conflict between these two ethnic groups in the Dehong Dai and Jingpo Nationality Autonomous Region (hereafter Dehong) in Yunnan, China. The caption is significant because it confirms widespread clashes between upland and lowland peoples before the 1950s, a historical fact often underplayed since the eradication of ethnic disharmony. Needless to say, conflict between upland peoples and lowland polities is a persistent theme in the history of pre-modern continental Southeast Asia. In his recent book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009), James Scott argues that upland peoples deliberately attempted to evade conflict by choosing a material lifestyle (residential location, agricultural techniques, and even rejection of written scripts) and ideology, and a flexible social organization that protected them from incorporation into the administrative systems of lowland polities. He asserts that upland peoples aspired for statelessness, adopting state evasion and state prevention as political strategies for dealing with lowland polities; the sheer immensity of lowland political and military power compelled upland peoples to choose non-contact and non-participation as survival strategies.2) This paper, based on empirical research, challenges Scott's thesis of state evasion and state prevention as the basic feature of lowland-upland relationships. It scrutinizes the validity of Scott's assumptions by examining the historical evidence of prolonged violent conflict in a Tay polity feudatory to the Qing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It specifically tries to ascertain whether upland-lowland relationships were as confrontational and incongruent as Scott claims, or whether they encompassed more symbiotic features such as interdependence and cooperation. The purpose is to try to broaden our perspective on the complexity of the history of upland peoples, in order to redress the simplistic view espoused by Scott.The empirical evidence comes from the case of the tiny polity of Mang2 Khon1, which experienced intense political turmoil and civil unrest from 1792 to 1836. According to the chronicle of the polity, previous Tay monarchs sponsored Buddhism and their subjects both on the mountains and in the basins had been relatively contented and law-abiding prior to this period, but suddenly the incumbent ruler could not ensure social and political order in the realm anymore. Civil war broke out and left the country rudderless for many years; the basin was burnt and inhabitants harried from end to end by warriors of three different ethnic groups. The cause of the strife was mismanagement by the monarch of two upland peoples, the Jingpo (Tay: Khaang1) and the Ta'aang (Tay: Pa4 long4/Po4 long4, Chinese: De'ang). The monarch brought the curse on himself by first bringing in the Ta'aang (rotten bamboo) to fight the rampant Jingpo (feral pigs). For this small realm, the four-decade war was of epic proportions: it divided the country into two factions pitted against each other, caused havoc and destruction, and brought normal administration to a halt. First a Tay group vied with a joint Ta'aang/Tay group, and later, after the fall of the Ta'aang, violent conflict broke out between two Tay cliques, one of which relied heavily on Jingpo mercenaries. This paper analyzes the roles of upland peoples in this four-decade conflict in order to clarify the exact nature of their connections with the Tay polity.3)The history of the relationships between upland ethnic groups and Tay polities is marred by scanty and scattered information. …