18세기 후반 훈춘 협령의 지역관리와 인삼행정

Abstract

Hunchun Regiment Colonel was the head of the banner garrison stationed in Hunchun under the supervision of senior commanders such as Jilin General and Ningguta Lieutenant General. His primary responsibility was to manage the affairs relevant to banner soldiers and their families in his jurisdiction. During the early Qing period, banner garrisons had been built as a military facility for Qing army to wage wars throughout the empire. As the Qing rule became consolidated in China and banner soldiers were permanently stationed in their dispatched locations, some banner garrisons in Manchuria, where other ruling organizations were not available, such as Hunchun, gradually took the role of a local administrative office. A report made by the Hunchun Regiment Colonel in 1748, for example, shows that he was responsible for a variety of tasks, including building guard posts and dispatching soldiers, patrolling mountains and rivers in his jurisdiction, managing land cultivation, reporting the amount of rainfall and snowfall on a regular base, taking care of the public granary, loaning silver to banner soldiers, and checking weapon management. Among these various duties, the ginseng management was one of the most important for the Hunchun Regiment Colonel. Largely available around the Hunchun region, ginseng was both the cultural symbol of the Manchus and the important income source for the Qing imperial court. The emperor imposed a strict order upon his banner officials to protect ginseng mountains in Manchuria. In order to come up to the imperial expectations, Jilin General, Ningguta Lieutenant General and Hunchun Regiment Colonel all endeavored to station banner soldiers in key locations and prevent illegal traffickers to access the ginseng mountains. Against all the efforts made by banner officials, however, soldiers and their families in Hunchun were involved in the ginseng business in many ways. Some of them joined the ginseng business in a legal route by purchasing legitimate ginseng licenses themselves or being a guarantor of ginseng poachers to share the taxes as well as profits. At the same time, there were multiple ways to gain ginseng profits against state regulations. Soldiers at the guard posts were supposed to arrest illegal poachers if they did not possess a legitimate pass, but instead they received bribes and allowed the criminals to sneak into the ginseng mountains. Other soldiers traded food and horses with ginseng hunters, a practice that were clearly against the regulation. By doing so, banner soldiers and ginseng, two key symbols of the Manchus, were closely intertwined in this remote corner of the Qing empire.