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Abstract

This thesis builds on existing scholarship on gender-based human trafficking in early modern China by examining how the Qing state actively participated through the mechanisms of official matchmakers in High Qing Southwest China. Focusing on two distinct contexts—the routine judicial trials in Ba County and the postwar distribution of indigenous populations in the Miao frontiers—it argues that legal and social categorizations rendered certain women “unclaimed,” making them particularly vulnerable to state-sanctioned commodification. Once a woman entered this process, the meaning of her commodification varied among county magistrates, official matchmakers, buyers, and the women themselves. The thesis further demonstrates that, in the Miao frontier context, official matchmakers played a central role in the distribution and commodification of indigenous populations, yet their involvement is largely obscured in archival records. By analyzing these two mechanisms, the thesis contributes to scholarship on gender history, state violence, and eighteenth-century Southwest China, centering women as active historical actors within these historical processes.