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Illegal Markets and the Formation of a Central Asian Borderland: The Turkestan–Xinjiang opium trade (1881–1917)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2020

NICCOLÒ PIANCIOLA
NICCOLÒ PIANCIOLA*
Affiliation:
Lingnan University Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article utilizes material from archives in Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan as well as published Chinese sources to explore the opium trade between Tsarist Turkestan and Xinjiang from the early 1880s to 1917. It focuses on two different levels: the borderlands economy and society, and state policies towards illegal (or ‘grey’) markets. The main groups active in the trade were Hui/Dungan and Taranchi migrants from China, who had fled Qing territory after the repression of the great anti-Qing Muslim revolts during the 1860s and 1870s. After settling in Tsarist territory, they grew poppies and exported opium back across the border to China. This article shows how the borderland economy was influenced by the late-Qing anti-opium campaign, and especially by the First World War. During the war, the Tsarist government tried to create a state opium monopoly over the borderland economy, but this attempt was botched first by the great Central Asian revolt of 1916, and later by the 1917 revolution. Departing from the prevailing historiography on borderlands, this article shows how the international border, far from being an obstacle to the trade, was instead the main factor that made borderland opium production and trade possible. It also shows how the borderland population made a strategic use of the border-as-institution, and how local imperial administrators—in different periods and for different reasons—adapted to, fostered, or repressed this most profitable borderland economic activity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 6 , November 2020 , pp. 1828 - 1875
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Research for this article has been conducted in the framework of the project ‘Imperial Borderlands and Transnational Illegal Markets: Opium Trade and Migrations between Russia, Inner Asia and Northeast China (1881–1937)’ funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (project code LU13600817). I would like to thank Scott Relyea and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of the text, James Fellows and Marco Caboara for editing assistance, and Gul'nar Moldakhanova and Bolat Zhanaev for their support of my research in the State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Almaty. I am also very grateful to the Centre d’études franco-russe de Moscou for supporting my research over the years.

References

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30 Kim, Hodong, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Migrations between Altishahr and Turkestan had already started after the Qing conquest in 1757; other migrations followed during the nineteenth century. Thousands of Kokandis living in Altishahr had been expelled by the Qing in the late 1820s as retaliation against the Kokand khanate, which had backed the anti-Qing rebellion led by Jahāngīr Khōja (1826–28). Other migrations of Kashgaris followed the Qing response to the invasion of Altishahr by Kokand troops in 1830 (Newby, The Empire and the Khanate, 95–152).

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41 Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 65.

42 TsGARK, 427/1/11/77, Documents about the history of the Dungan uprising in China and their migration to Russia during 1878–1882.

43 Lavelle, Peter, ‘Cultivating Empire: Zuo Zongtang's Agriculture, Environment, and Reconstruction in the Late Qing’, in China on the Margins, edited by Cochran, Sherman and Pickowicz, Paul G. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2010), 43–64Google Scholar. For a brief description of Zuo Zongtang's recapture of Shaanxi and Gansu from anti-Qing Muslim rebels, see Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 118–29; for Zuo's campaign in Xinjiang, see Kim, Holy War in China, 159–78. Cf. also Chu, Wen-Djang, The Moslem Rebellion in Northwest China, 1862–1878: A Study of Government Minority Policy (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966), 89–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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55 The other two oblasts besides Ili-Ghulja under direct fiscal control from Tashkent were the Zeravshan and Ferghana oblasts. Cf. Pravilova, Ekaterina, Finansy imperii: dengi i vlast' v politike Rossii na natsional'nykh okrainakh, 1801–1917 (Moskva: Novoe izdatel'stvo, 2006), 128–9Google Scholar.

56 Desiatina was a Russian unit of land measurement equivalent to 1.093 hectares.

57 The town was mostly known in Russia and in Western Europe as Suidun.

58 Kim, Holy War in China, 121.

59 TsGARK, 21/1/501/25, 25ob, 26, 26ob (1880), Kol'pakovskii to Von Kaufman, ‘Po povodu proizvodstva opiia v Kuldzhinskom krae’.

60 Paine, Imperial Rivals, 132–5. Cf. also Voskresenskii, Aleksei D., ‘Genezis “Iliiskogo krizisa” i russko-kitaiskii Livadiiskii dogovor 1879 g.’, Cahiers du monde russe 35/4 (1994): 763–86Google Scholar.

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63 Some of the migrants moved voluntarily. See Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 306, 345, 351–3Google Scholar; Bellér-Hann, Ildikó, Community Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the early twentieth century, Taranchis and Kashgaris were the main groups included in the newly created Uyghur ethnonational label. Cf. Brophy, David, ‘Taranchis, Kashgaris, and the “Uyghur Question” in Soviet Central Asia’, Inner Asia, 7/2 (2005): 163–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 141–232.

64 Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 68.

65 GARF, 102/79/235/183 (1886), Log book of the military and political facts and rumours on the western Chinese border of the Governor-Generalship of the Steppes for the month of January 1886.

66 TsGARK, 64/1/77/16 (03.09.1882), ‘Journal of the Semirech'e Oblast’ Directorate: On the Distribution of Kirghiz from the Southern Area of the Ghulja District Who Became Russian Subjects in 1882’, in Prisoedinenie Kazakhstana i Srednei Azii k Rossii (XVIII–XIX veka). Dokumenty, edited by Bekmakhanova, N. E. (Moskva: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2008), 336Google Scholar.

67 According to Tsarist estimates made in 1876, the Ili territory occupied by Tsarist troops was inhabited by 51,819 Taranchis, 33,828 Kazaks, 18,318 Sibe, 4,031 Dungans, 2,847 Han Chinese, 15,940 Oyrad Mongols and Torghuts, and 767 Solon. Among them, Tsarist military statistics counted 82,142 settled people and 49,786 nomads. See Pantusov, Nikolai, Svedeniia o Kul'dzhinskom raione za 1871-77 gody, sobrannye N.N. Pantusovym (Kazan: v Universitetskoi Tipografii, 1881), 9Google Scholar, cited in Noda, ‘Reconsidering the Ili Crisis’, 177.

68 Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 71.

69 The Semirech'e Cossack Host was created by separating 1,500 households from the Siberian Cossacks Host in 1867. According to the plan drafted by Kol'pakovskii in 1869, up to 10,000 Russian peasants should have been distributed in approximately 80 villages. The first 242 peasants from the Voronezh province (Western Russia) had arrived by 1868. Cf. Pianciola, N., Stalinismo di frontiera: Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia Centrale (1905–1936) (Rome: Viella, 2009), 47–8Google Scholar.

70 TsGARK, 44/1/48262/303, Register of Issyk-kul’ population, by soslovie, in 1879.

71 TsGARK, 44/1/37392/45 (10.06.1884), Zapiska o pereselenii kul'dzhinskikh osedlykh musul'man v Semirechenskuyu oblast.

72 The procedure implied that the uezd chief had to request from the district chief of the Dungans concerned an official declaration committing them to refund any damage caused by the travelling Dungans.

73 TsGARK, 427/1/11/11, Documents about the history of the Dungan uprising in China and their migration to Russia in the years 1878–1882.

74 Obzor Semirech'enskoi Oblasti za 1885, cited in Sushanlo, M., Dungane (istoriko-etnograficheskoe issledovanie) (Frunze: dokt. dissertatsiia, Akademia Nauk Kirgizskoi SSR, 1969), 5, 147, 151–2, 178Google Scholar.

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76 TsGARK, 44/1/37392/45-45ob (10.06.1884), Zapiska o pereselenii kul'dzhinskikh osedlykh musul'man v Semirechenskuyu oblast.

77 Sushanlo, Dungane, 177.

78 TsGARK, 44/1/37392/47 (10.06.1884), Zapiska o pereselenii kul'dzhinskikh osedlykh musul'man v Semirechenskuyu oblast. In 1888, the administration counted 77 mullahs and imams among the Semirech'e Dungan community (‘Obshchee prisutstvie Semirech'enskoi oblasti’, 12 May 1888, cited in Sushanlo, Dungane, 159).

79 Reproductions of the Chinese and Russian maps used during the negotiations, along with the protocols, can be found in主編 李天鳴, 林天人; 文字撰述 陳維新]. 李天鳴. 林天人. 陳維新. 失落的疆域 : 清季西北邊界變遷條約輿圖特展 /國立故宮博物院 (Tianming Li; Tianren Lin; Weixin Chen Shi luo de jiang yu: Qing ji xi bei bian jie bian qian tiao yue yu tu te zhan (Taibei: Guo li gu gong bo wu yuan, 2010)). I am indebted to Marco Caboara for this reference.

80 GARF, 601/1/685/1-1ob, Adres predstavitelei taranchinskogo i dunganskogo naroda nasledniku vel. kn. Nikolaiu Aleksandrovichu s prosboi o priniatii ikh v russkoe poddanstvo, 1891. I am indebted to David Brophy for referring me to this document.

81 GARF, 102 (D-2)/1892/236/4ob (19.10.1892), Vypiska iz doneseniia konsula v Kul'zhe N. 620, Direktoru Aziiatskago Departamenta.

82 Cf., for instance, GARF, 102 (D-2)/1892/236/7 (06.09.1893), Tainyi Sovetnik Shishkin to Von Pleve. The letter mentions the migration from Semirech'e to Xinjiang of 106 Kazak households (around 500 people) of the tribe Baibulat.

83 Mendikulova, Atantaeva, Istoriia migratsii, 108, 111.

84 TsGARK, 64/1/60/6ob (December 1882), Otchët voennogo gubernatora Semirechenskoi oblasti G.A. Kolpakovskogo general-gubernatoru Stepnogo general-gubernatorstva, published in Bekmakhanova, Prisoedinenie Kazakhstana, 338.

85 Mendikulova, Atantaeva, Istoriia migratsii, 130.

86 GARF, 102/46/135/1-7 (14.03.1891), Communication from the governor general of the Steppes to the Ministry of the Interior, with attached copy of the Gelaohui Membership Certificates’. For a reproduction and explanation of Gelaohui membership certificates, see Robert H. Felsing, The Heritage of Han: The Gelaohui and the 1911 Revolution in Sichuan (University of Iowa: PhD dissertation, 1979), 77.

87 TsGARK, 21/1/501/25 (undated, but from 1880), Po povodu proizvodstva opiia v Kuldzhinskom krae.

88 Sushanlo, Dungane, 171.

89 Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN), 174/7a/5/32-34 (1929), A. A. Rybnikova, ‘Sel'sko-khoziaistvennye rajony Dzharkentskogo uezda’. The report provided a history of the uezd economy.

90 On 15 May, the Chinese government ratified the treaty; the exchange of Tsarist and Qing ratifications happened on 19 August; Ili was returned to China in February 1882. See Hsü, The Ili Crisis, 171–88.

91 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/69-73ob (January 1912), Report from the Semirech'e military governor to the Turkestan governor general, Aleksandr Vasilevich Samsonov.

92 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/30ob (06.03.1904), Report of the chief of the Turkestan Customs District to Semirech'e military governor.

93 Tsentral'nyj Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki (hereafter TsGAKR), 46/1/208/1-19, Protokol o konfiskatsii u sarta Sokhundzhana loshadi s opiumom i dr. tovarami, 1891; 46/1/209/1-18, Protokol o konfiskatsii u kirgiza Alapaeva loshadi 1/4 funta opiuma i dr. tovarov, 1891; 46/1/221/1-15, Protokol, opis' tovarov, postanovleniia i drugie dokumenty o konfiskatsii u kitaiskikh poddannykh 8 pudov 15 1/4 funtov anashi i 78 zolotnikov opiuma, 1892; 46/1/247/1-17, Protokol o konfiskatsii … opiuma, loshadi, i drugikh tovarov u neizvestnogo po imeni sarta, 1895.

94 Collection of Governor Yang Zengxin's Decrees, Volume 19 Gengji 3: Waijiao huibian 3 (Jinyan), 電院部請與俄使交涉對於在俄種煙華人保全生命資本文 (‘Telegram to the Ministry requesting to contact the Russian ambassador regarding the Chinese subjects growing opium in Russia, and requesting/seeking protection for their lives and property’, 22.06.1917), p. 2334. I am indebted to David Brophy for pointing out this source to me and to Ring Mei Han Low for the translation from Chinese.

95 Trocki, Carl A., Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 128–31Google Scholar; Dikötter, Frank, Laamann, Lars, and Xun, Zhou, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 110–1Google Scholar.

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97 Yongming, Zhou, Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China: Nationalism, History, and State Building (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 25–37Google Scholar.

98 Judith Wyman, ‘Opium and the State in Late-Qing Sichuan’, in Brook and Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes, 212–27. According to estimates cited by Derks (History of the Opium Problem, 636), Yunnan, the second province by opium output, produced less than one-fifth of the Sichuan quantity.

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100 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/69-73ob (January 1912), Report from the Semirech'e military governor to the Turkestan governor general, Aleksandr Vasilevich Samsonov.

101 Ibid. During the same period, opium cultivation was prohibited farther south, in Western Pamir (present-day Tajikistan), another Tsarist-controlled region bordering with Xinjiang. Mukhanov, the head of Tsarist Pamir garrison, introduced drug prohibition in the region in 1906. See Latypov, Alisher, ‘The Opium War at the “Roof of the World”: the “Elimination” of Addiction in Soviet Badakhshan’, Central Asian Survey, 32/1 (2013): 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/69-73ob (January 1912), Report from the Semirech'e military governor to the Turkestan governor general, Aleksandr Vasilevich Samsonov.

103 Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 164–8.

104 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/69-73ob (January 1912), Report from the Semirech'e military governor to the Turkestan governor general, Aleksandr Vasilevich Samsonov.

105 Galiev, Vladimir, Kazakhstan v sisteme rossiisko-kitaiskikh torgovo-ekonomicheskikh otnoshenii v Sintsiane (konets XIX-nachalo XX vv.) (Almaty: Institut Istorii i Etnologii im. Ch.Ch. Valikhanova, 2003), 85–9, 95Google Scholar.

106 During the 1920s, this ratio was 10:1, but it was significant also before the First World War. See Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 186.

107 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/69-73ob (January 1912), Report from the Semirech'e military governor to the Turkestan governor general, Aleksandr Vasilevich Samsonov.

108 Ibid.

109 E. I. Svirlovskii, Kul'tura maka i dobyvanie opiia v Semirech'e (otchët o komandirovke v Semirech'e) (Petrograd: A.E. Vineke, 1917), 37.

110 TsGARK, 76/1/426 (1913).

111 Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan (hereafter TsGARUz), R-29/3/2098/15 (March–April 1921), ‘K voprosu o zagotovke opija’.

112 Russian towns in Semirech'e were partially agricultural settlements in which fields and orchards were scattered among the houses.

113 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/135 (30.08.1914), anonymous handwritten letter to the Semirech'e military governor, signed ‘local dweller, town of Przheval'sk’.

114 Ibid., l. 135ob.

115 For a convincing interpretation of the continuum between war and revolution in the Russian empire as a process of mass mobilization, followed by mass demobilization and state collapse, see Lohr, Eric and Sanborn, Joshua, ‘1917: Revolution as Demobilization and State Collapse’, Slavic Review 76/3 (2017): 703–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116 Russian State Archive of the Economy (hereafter RGAE), 3429/3/170/1-14 (11.06.1923), Doklad V. I. Massal'skogo, ‘K voprosu o vozmozhnosti eksporta opiia’ (Trudy sektsii vneshnei torgovli otdela torgovoi i finansovoi politiki V.S.N.Kh.)’.

117 Until 1922, when the tariff was changed, the tariff for ten puds of opium (needed for the production of 1 pud of morphine) was 225 rubles, whereas the tariff on the import of one pud of morphine was 80 rubles. Cf. RGAE, 3429/3/170/1 (11.06.1923), Doklad V.I. Massal'skogo.

118 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/136 (30.08.1914), anonymous handwritten letter to the Semirech'e military governor, signed ‘local dweller, town of Przheval'sk’.

119 Ibid.

120 TsGARK, 44/1/37979/137 (13.09.1914), telegram from Semirech'e Military Governor Fol'baum to the governor general in Tashkent. The government had instituted prohibition in July 1914, ‘with a single stroke wiping out between one-quarter and one-third of all government revenues, blowing a massive hole in the treasury’ (Schrad, Mark Lawrence, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 186Google Scholar). This was considered a temporary measure aimed at avoiding mobilization riots but, during the war, both the government and the Duma put forward proposals to make the prohibition permanent (Chagadaeva, Ol'ga, ‘Sukhoi zakon’ v Rossiiskoi imperii i gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (po materialam Petrograda i Moskvy) (Moskva: AIRO-XXI, 2016), 70–3, 121–35Google Scholar).

121 TsGARUz, R-29/3/2098/15ob.

122 TsGARUz, R-25/1/530/608-608ob, Transcript (zhurnal) of session n. 22 of the Council of People's Commissars of Turkestan, 24 June 1920.

123 Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (hereafter RGASPI), 122/1/220/1ob (undated, but from 1921–22), ‘Report of the President of the Commission about the Semirech'e Railway, Engineer Frolov’. Frolov was quoting data from Vasil'ev, V. A., Semirechenskaya oblast’, kak koloniia i rol' v nei Chuiskoi doliny (Petrograd: Ekaterin. tip., 1915)Google Scholar.

124 Svirlovskii, Kul'tura maka, 9.

125 On 17 February 1915, the Tsarist government authorized the army to set the purchase prices and the quantities (‘quotas’) of grain to be bought in the various regions to feed the soldiers, in agreement with local governors and the Ministry of Agriculture. Cf. Stanziani, A., L’économie en révolution. Le cas russe, 1870–1930 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 155Google Scholar.

126 Chemical analyses after the 1916 harvest showed that all Semirech'e opium had a high morphine content: opium from the Pishpek area had 12.2 per cent morphine content on average, from the Tokmak area 12.8 per cent, from the Przheval'sk area 9 per cent, from the Zharkent area 11.5 per cent (Svirlovskii, Kul'tura maka, 8, 12, 21–2).

127 Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera, 95–8.

128 Broido, G. I., ‘Materialy k istorii vosstaniia kirgiz v 1916 godu (pokazanie, dannoe 3 sentiabria 1916 g. G.I. Broido prokuroru Tashkentskoi sudebnoi palaty po delu o kirgizskom vosstanii 1916 g.)’, Novyi Vostok 6 (1924): 426Google Scholar.

129 The total number of Europeans killed during the revolt in Turkestan was 2,521 (plus 1,457 missing persons, mostly kidnapped); 21 Central Asian members of the Tsarist administration were also killed (11 in Ferghana, no one in Semirech'e). See ‘Report of Governor-General A.N. Kuropatkin to the Tsar Nikolai II on the Causes of the Uprising of 1916 and the Measures Taken by the Administration for Its Repression’ (22 February 1917), in Vosstanie 1916 goda v Srednei Azii i Kazakhstane. Sbornik dokumentov, edited by Piaskovskii, A. V., et al. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk, 1960), 87–100Google Scholar; Sokol, E. D., The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954), 120–1Google Scholar.

130 Madzhun, Dzhamilya, Vosstanie 1916 g. v kontekste mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii v Tsentral'noi Azii i uchastie v nem dungan (Bishkek: Natsional'naia AN Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki, 2016)Google Scholar; Madzhun, Dzhamilya, ‘Vnedrenie kul'tury opiumnogo maka i ego vliianie na tragicheskie sobytiia 1916 goda v Semirech'e’, Vestnik NGU. Seriia: Istoriia, filologiia 16/1 (2017): 102–10Google Scholar; Malabaev, Salamat, ‘Rol' vneshnikh sil v eskalatsii tragicheskikh sobytii 1916 g. v Kyrgyzstane’, in Tsivilizatsionno-kul'turnye aspekty vzaimootnoshenii Rossii i narodov Tsentral'noi Azii v nachale XX stoletiia (1916 god: uroki obshchei tragedii), edited by Kotyukova, T. V. (Moskva 2016), 119–26Google Scholar.

131 TsGAKR, 75/1/2/2 (05.11.1916), ‘Iz protokola doprosa meshchanina Aleksandra Zinov'eva, Przheval'sk’.

132 RGAE, 3429/3/170/5 (11.06.1923), Doklad V.I. Massal'skogo.

133 Buttino, Marko [Marco Buttino], Revoliutsiia naoborot: Srednaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR (Moskva: Zven'ja, 2007), 70Google Scholar.

134 Jacobs, Xinjiang, 54; Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot, 75–8, 146–56; Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera, 101–11.

135 RGAE, 3429/3/170/6 (11.06.1923), Doklad V.I. Massal'skogo.

136 RGAE, 3429/3/170/7 (11.06.1923), Doklad V.I. Massal'skogo.

137 Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot, 73–4, 107.

138 TsGARK, 369/1/1356/1-23 (April–September 1914): circular letter of the Directorate-General of the Army Staff; communications (telegrams) between the Ministry of Interiors and the Governatorates and between the Governors and the police chiefs.

139 Lohr, Eric, Russian Citizenship. From Empire to the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 79–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

140 GARF, 6996/1/119/21-22 (July 1917), Ministerstvo Zemledeliia, Doklad Nachalnika Pereselencheskogo Upravleniia.

141 Collection of Governor Yang Zengxin's Decrees, Volume 19 Gengji 3: Waijiao huibian 3 (Jinyan), 電院部請與俄使交涉對於在俄種煙華人保全生命資本文 (‘Telegram to the Ministry requesting to contact the Russian ambassador regarding the Chinese subjects growing opium in Russia and requesting/seeking protection for their lives and property’, 22.06.1917), p. 2334.

142 TsGARK, 9/1/9/46ob (04.04.1917), copy of the telegram by the Russian consul in Ghulja, Brodyanskii to the Committee of the Provisional Government in Semirech'e and to the Military Directorate of Semirech'e.

143 Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot, 149.

144 TsGARK, 9/1/9/46 (31.07.1917), message of the Committee of the Provisional Government to the Military Directorate of Semirech'e.

145 Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot, 154, 211–38.

146 TsGARK, 9/1/5/187-188 (04.11.1917), Report by the Przheval'sk uezd commissioner.

147 Jacobs, Xinjiang, 58.

148 TsGARK, 9/1/9/46 (31.07.1917), Message of the Committee of the Provisional Government to the Military Directorate of Semirech'e.

149 For similar processes on the Sino-French Vietnamese border in Guangxi, and their setbacks, cf. Lary, Diana, ‘A Zone of Nebulous Menace: The Guangxi/Indochina Border in the Republican Period’, in The Chinese State at the Borders, edited by Lary, Diana (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 181–97Google Scholar.

150 Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders. See also Hopkins, Benjamin D. and Marsden, Magnus, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 23–30Google Scholar.

151 Michaud, Jean, ‘From Southwest China into Upper Indochina: An Overview of Hmong (Miao) Migrations’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 38/2 (1997): 119–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michaud, Jean and Culas, Christian, ‘The Hmong of the Southeast Asia Massif: Their Recent History of Migration’, in Where China Meets Southeast Asia: Social and Cultural Change in the Border Regions, edited by Evans, Grant, Hutton, Christopher, and Eng, Kuah Khun (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 102–5Google Scholar.

152 Robert J. Antony, ‘Piracy and the Shadow Economy in the South China Sea, 1780–1810’, in Antony, Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers, 99–114; Antony, Robert J., Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2003), 118–38Google Scholar.

153 Gamsa, Mark, ‘California on the Amur, or the “Zheltuga Republic” in Manchuria (1883–86)’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 81/2 (2003): 236–66Google Scholar; Zatsepine, Victor, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850-1930 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), 62–7Google Scholar.

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156 Abdurasulov and Sartori, ‘Neopredelennost’ kak politika’.