The most numerous people of the middle Amur - salmon fishers who dressed in tanned fish skin, which earned them the Chinese name 'Fish-skin Tartars'. Their territory strung along 500 miles of the Amur and up the Ussuri and Sungari, close enough to Qing markets to trade but too dispersed to be governed.
Not an ending: the Nanai paid fur tribute to the Qing without being ruled by them until the Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860) treaties moved the whole Amur-Ussuri country into the Russian Empire and split the people across a new border; about 12,000 Nanai live in Russia today and several thousand Hezhe in China.
The classic full-length ethnography of the Nanai/Hezhe, written from fieldwork on the lower Sungari before collectivisation and the border closure.
Used for the Nanai's measured territory on the middle Amur and for the Aigun/Peking treaties that ended their independence.