The Ch'iang of ancient China through the Han dynasty: Ecological frontiers and ethnic boundaries

The Ch'iang, who live in northwestern Szechwan province, are one of the 55 officially designated ethnic minorities in China. During the Han dynasty, people with this name were widely distributed along Han China's western frontiers, from eastern Chinghai (Ho-Huang) to western Szechwan. The name Ch'iang were mentioned in various even earlier Chinese documents, from the oracle-bone inscriptions of the 14th century B.C. to the works of the 4th century B.C. philosophers. Thus, it has been widely assumed that the Ch'iang are an ethnic group with a long history.; This essay explores the formation of the Ho-Huang Ch'iang in the Han dynasty along two dimensions. First, a series of changes in human ecology which occurred in the Ho-huang area from ca. 3000 B.C. to 500 B.C. eventually transformed its inhabitants from sedentary farmers into nomadic pastoralists, with a social organization that can best be characterized as "decentralized." Compared with the world of the Han Chinese, this area was an ecological frontier.; Second, since the word Ch'iang was an ethnic label by which the Chinese identified some non-Chinese people in the west, it can be seen as word describing "a sense of otherness" for the Chinese. In the period when the ethnic entity of the Chinese was forming, ch'iang became a shifting ethnic boundary--as western populations merged more and more into the Chinese, this ethnic boundary shifted westward. Finally it reached the ecological frontier during the Han period. The Chinese could not govern those lands and peoples in the Chinese way, and the natives of these areas could not adopt the Chinese way of production and social organization. The ethnic boundary has remained fixed ever since.; Thus, during the period from the Shang dynasty to the Han, the Ch'iang was not a "people" that had continuity in time and space. Instead, it was an ethnic boundary, a concept among the Chinese. When we trace the history of the Ch'iang, we are tracing not the history of a non-Chinese people but a part of the history of the Chinese themselves.