Between 1751 and 1784, the Qianlong emperor embarked upon six southern tours, travelling from Beijing to Jiangnan and back. These tours were exercises in political theatre that took the Manchu emperor through one of the Qing empire's most prosperous regions. This study elucidates the tensions and the constant negotiations characterising the relationship between the imperial centre and Jiangnan, which straddled the two key provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Politically, economically and culturally, Jiangnan was the undisputed centre of the Han Chinese world; it also remained a bastion of Ming loyalism and anti-Manchu sentiment. How did the Qing court constitute its authority and legitimate its domination over this pivotal region? What were the precise terms and historical dynamics of Qing rule over China proper during the long 18th Century? In the course of addressing such questions, this study also explores the political culture within and through which High Qing rule was constituted and contested by a range of actors, all of whom operated within socially and historically structured contexts. The author argues that the southern tours occupied a central place in the historical formation of Qing rule during a period of momentous change affecting all strata of the 18th-Century polity.

本书共分为7章，包括“不稳定的财政根源”、“非正式经费体系”、“火耗归公”、“财政合理化改革和各地的试验”、“地方改革的多样性和基本原则”、“改革的障碍：基层腐败和江南清查案”、及“前瞻：火耗归公改革的失败”。

Making extensive use of Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, and Western sources, the author adopts a historical multifaceted approach to explore the various forces geography, economics, frontier contacts, political and social institutions; language, literature and art; religion and Confucianism that made possible the Manchu adoption of Chinese ways of life.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources.
In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature.