Contesting Frontier Landscapes: Bazi Land in Northeastern Yunnan

With its harsh and unwelcome terrain, almost all settlement in the Southwest has developed on bazi land.  Bazi is a common vernacular term in Southwest China used to refer to the fertile and flat valleys in the interior of mountainous regions.  In Yunnan province there are around 1,800 such valleys, varying in size from a couple of square kilometers to several hundred square kilometers, but they comprise only six percent of total land area. As the only areas suitable for concentrated settlement, bazi form the centers of interactions between past and present, indigenous and foreign, where different groups compete for power and space in the Southwest. Similar to other parts of the Southwest, northeastern Yunnan continued to be occupied primarily by indigenous peoples for many centuries.  In the eighteenth century the Qing implemented its policy of eliminating the native prefect system and establishing their new government center on the bazi land of northeastern Yunnan.  Meanwhile, drawn by the flourishing mining business, increasing numbers of Han Chinese migrants from other parts of China hurried here to find work and settle.  Taking bazi lands of northeastern Yunnan between 1600-1900 as examples, this paper aims to rethink how the dynamic relationship of landscape and various groups were contextualized by social, economic and cultural conditions.  Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the paper examines landscape practices and representations as a way of dividing or uniting people, indigenous or not, who lived in baziof the Southwest during the process of Chinese state building.