Across the Boundaries: Human Trade and the State in Qing Southwest Sichuan

In 1834, Bu Lie, a slave girl of a yi (yi ‘夷’ as one of the names of the Qing documents addressing the indigenous people in Southern China) household nearby Mianning County in Southwest Sichuan, was abducted by two yi men living on the land of the Jingyuan garrison eastward of Mianning. Only after six months did Bu Lie find a chance to escape, and she spent two days walking across mountains and returning home. Bu Lie’s experience reveals the dangers that women encountered in Mianning as an unstable frontier. While scholars have mainly focused on the traffic in women as family strategies or marriage forms in China Proper, little attention has been given to frontiers. This paper looks at how ordinary women, especially the non-Han, managed to survive in a frontier society characterized by border-crossing migrations, ethnic cooperation and conflicts, and varied social customs. Mainly based on the Mianning County Archive, together with gazetteers and ethnographies, I examine how the Qing state managed to resolve cases of traffic in women through a multi-layered and pluralistic legal system. Implementing legal power in Mianning was always involved in power negotiations between geographies of governance, polyethnic communities and institutions, and different legal practices and ideas. By investigating how the Qing state sustained the legal order in Mianning, this paper contributes to future scholarship that explores the extent and limits of the state’s reach out of geographical, ethnic, and socio-cultural complexities in dynamic frontier societies.