ABSTRACT
Using Manchu documents that reported a test cultivation of rice in late 18th-century Khotan as a case study, this chapter considers the significance of wet riziculture as a means of nurturing environmental conditions that could enhance the incorporation of borderlands into the Qing empire. Riziculture wasnot just a means of maximizing food supply, but relying on a suitable combination of environmental (i.e., ecological and social) elements, the state could use wet rice farming to temper the vast diversity of its lands and subjects into more manageable, more monocultural arrangement formed around a core agricultural practice of China proper. This process of agrarian incorporation itself, however, had to adapt to borderland environments that could alter or inhibit its intended centralizing effects. In this respect, incorporation was not a purely cultural enterprise but an agricultural compromise, subject to particular people, plants, and climate.
