Empire Fashioned in Fur: the Solon Mink Tribute, Patrician Hierarchy and Qing Hunting Tradition

• In Event: Empires and Environment-Based Norms: How Hunters and Herders Shaped "Imperial Order" in the Qing-Russian Borderlands

Abstract

The Inner Asian Manchu and Mongol patricians of China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), were distinctively garbed through “mink tribute,” trapped by indigenous Solon peoples of the empire’s far northeastern territory of Heilongjiang. The ritually regulated imperial chapeaus, court dresses, and sitting pads pieced together from this tribute were employed within the dynasty’s Forbidden City palace complex as an ethnic political expression of the symbolic continuity of Inner Asian hunting traditions distinguishing the pinnacle of elite hierarchy at the very heart of the empire. Palace consumption of northeastern forage like mink was a visible affirmation of dynastic links between the hunting space of its Manchurian origins and the expanded political space of its subsequent imperial domain. Mink tribute was a material expression of the Qing unification Inner Asian borderlands and China proper as maintained through central government institutions of Lifanyuan and Neiwufu that coordinated with regional administrations like that of the General of Heilongjiang. These unique administrative institutions afforded the Qing its unique symbolic resources like mink to embody imperial unification in a unique style of Inner Asian hunting tradition that has not been explored in much detail. The paper will employ other distinctively Qing resources, namely Manchu-language documents that articulate this style more precisely in its own idiom.

Author

• Ning Chia, Central College