ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that fortified walls functioned as a vital tool for not just defence, but also social ordering. Late eighteenth-century insurgency erupted along the inner peripheries of the Qing Empire, if in different social milieu. The Miao revolt, raging on the mountainous Hunan-Guizhou provincial border, was an ethnic conflict in which native Miao clans united to reclaim lands lost to intrusive Han Chinese settlers. Civil fortification of China's war-torn borderlands had a clear military purpose. As the frontier opened in the eighteenth century, permitting Han to migrate in and Miao to expand out, natives became scattered, impoverished and bitter-grown desperate in a mountain environment ideally suited for guerrilla resistance. As rebellion ravaged the border of Hubei, Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces, Qing planners again turned to the solution of bao walls. The discussion of bao fortification in China's late-eighteenth-century Miao and White Lotus revolts supports Kuhn's insight, but suggests that Qing administrative plans for state-sponsored community mobilization had social ramifications.
