This article considers the roles of yak bodies in relations between Han Chinese and Khampa Tibetan communities during the early twentieth century. It argues that bovine bodies were sites of Han-Tibetan interaction wherein culture, biology, and locality were intertwined. I chronicle the earliest large-scale engagement of the Chinese state with yak pastoralism in the context of its efforts to consolidate control over the eastern Tibetan region of Kham. Yak husbandry is traditionally an enterprise of Tibetans and other Himalayan ethnic groups, but the yak was targeted for ‘improvement’ by Han Chinese modernizers beginning in the 1930s. An effort to decouple the yak from its Tibetan cultural context at the Taining Experimental Zone saw mixed results. Livestock scientists there made modest gains in productivity, yet they did so by approximating to a high degree the nomadic mode of production from which they were attempting to extract the yak.
Across Tibet during the 1940s, young Han Chinese weather observers became stranded at their weather stations, where they faced illness, poverty and isolation as they pleaded with their superiors for relief. Building on the premise that China exercised ‘imperial nationalism’ in Tibet, and in light of scholarship that emphasizes the desirous ‘gaze’ of imperial observers toward the frontier, this essay considers how the meteorological archive might disrupt our understanding of the relationship between observation and empire. Meteorology presented a new way of viewing the landscape that deliberately disregarded the embodied experience of the observer in favour of instrument-mediated readings. The process produced a bifurcated archive, in which stations disseminated quantitative weather charts as a matter of public interest while privately recording the embodied and often miserable experiences of observational staff on the frontier. Unpublished letters between observers and supervisors offer a rare glimpse into the frontier as experienced by reluctant or unwilling agents of the state.
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