The Forgotten Green Great Wall: The Willow Palisade in Manchuria during the Qing Period

Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware

My paper explores the rise of fall of the Willow Palisade in Manchuria during the Qing in order to show the prolonged integration of Manchuria into the bigger concept of China in late imperial time. Known as “Liutiao bian” in Chinese and “jase” in Manchu, the Willow Palisade was an internal boundary built by the Manchu ruling house since the 1630s by planting willow trees and tying willow branches together to define the Manchu home area in South Manchuria and separate it from the Han Chinese, Mongol, and Korean areas. The paper aims to engage several understudied but important topics on borderland, society, and state. These topics include the integration of Manchuria into the Eurasian empire of the Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty; the practice of state-dictated isolation of Manchuria through the Willow Palisade; the famines in North China and Mongol areas and the subsequent great immigration of Han Chinese, Mongols, and Koreans into Manchuria; the private business in South Manchuria, which transformed the demography of local society; the imperial rituals beyond the palisade in the long eighteenth-century and their influences on the Manchu identity of the Qing ruling house; the border-cross trade network between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese through South Manchuria; and the modernization of South Manchuria and its consequences.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 38. Boundaries of Qing Frontier Politics: Shamanism, Property Right, and Inner Barrier