Author: Xiuyu Wang
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739168096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
China's Last Imperial Frontier explores imperial China's frontier expansion in the Tibetan borderlands during the last decades of the Qing. The empire mounted a series of military attacks against indigenous chieftaincies and Buddhist monasteries in the east Tibetan region seeking to replace native authorities with state bureaucrats by redrawing the politically diverse frontier into a system of Chinese-style counties. Historically, at all the strategic frontier locations, the state had been for the most part outstripped by local institutions in political, military, and ideological strengths. With perceived threats from the Anglo-Russian "Great Game" accentuating Qing vulnerability in Tibet, the Sichuan government took advantage of the frontier crisis by encroaching upon local and Lhasa domains in Kham. Even though the Kham campaign was portrayed in Qing official discourse as a part of the nationwide reforms of "New Policies" (xinzheng) and administrative regularization (gaitu guiliu), its progress on the ground was influenced by the dynamics of interregional relations, including Sichuan's competition with central Tibet, power struggles among Qing frontier officials, and varied Khampa responses to the new regime. The growing regionalism intensified the resistance of local forces to imperial authority. Despite the uneven results of the late Qing campaign, it had come to serve as an important source of sovereignty claims and policy inspirations for the subsequent governments.
Author: Yingcong Dai
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295800704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
During China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), the empire's remote, bleak, and politically insignificant Southwest rose to become a strategically vital area. This study of the imperial government's handling of the southwestern frontier illuminates issues of considerable importance in Chinese history and foreign relations: Sichuan's rise as a key strategic area in relation to the complicated struggle between the Zunghar Mongols and China over Tibet, Sichuan's neighbor to the west, and consequent developments in governance and taxation of the area. Through analysis of government documents, gazetteers, and private accounts, Yingcong Dai explores the intersections of political and social history, arguing that imperial strategy toward the southwestern frontier was pivotal in changing Sichuan's socioeconomic landscape. Government policies resulted in light taxation, immigration into Sichuan, and a military market for local products, thus altering Sichuan but ironically contributing toward the eventual demise of the Qing. Dai's detailed, objective analysis of China's historical relationship with Tibet will be useful for readers seeking to understand debates concerning Tibet's sovereignty, Tibetan theocratic government, and the political dimension of the system of incarnate Tibetan lamas (of which the Dalai Lama is one).
Author: Sarah C.M. Paine
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000943682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Based on archival research, this is a history of the Russo-Chinese border which examines Russia's expansion into the Asian heartland during the decades of Chinese decline and the 20th-century paradox of Russia's inability to sustain political and economic sway over its domains.
Author: Charles Patterson Giersch
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674021716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
With comparative frontier history and pioneering use of indigenous sources, Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest. He focuses on the Tai domains of the Yunnan frontier on the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Author: Charles Sanft
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438475136
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Through an examination of archaeologically recovered texts from China’s northwestern border regions, argues for widespread interaction with texts in the Han period. This book examines ancient written materials from China’s northwestern border regions to offer fresh insights into the role of text in shaping society and culture during the Han period (206/2 BCE–220 CE). Left behind by military installations, these documents—wooden strips and other nontraditional textual materials such as silk—recorded the lives and activities of military personnel and the people around them. Charles Sanft explores their functions and uses by looking at a fascinating array of material, including posted texts on signaling across distances, practical texts on brewing beer and evaluating swords, and letters exchanged by officials working in low rungs of the bureaucracy. By focusing on all members of the community, he argues that a much broader section of early society had meaningful interactions with text than previously believed. This major shift in interpretation challenges long-standing assumptions about the limited range of influence that text and literacy had on culture and society and makes important contributions to early China studies, the study of literacy, and to the global history of non-elites. “Sanft’s analysis fills out what is still a rather sparse picture of life in non-elite, nonofficial social circles. For the first time ever, we learn how women might have been included in a literate community along the ancient northwestern frontier, and we also learn how soldiers and other members of the uneducated or semiliterate public made use of the extensive knowledge that texts conveyed in their work and lives. None of this information is apparent from traditionally received texts. Sanft therefore does the field a great favor by systematically laying the foundations for a broader understanding of all levels of society, as well as an understanding of how these levels interconnect through systems of knowledge expressed through text.” — Erica Fox Brindley, author of Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE–50 CE
Author: Matthew Mosca
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804785384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.
Author: Pamela Kyle Crossley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520927532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
Focusing on the Ming (1368-1644) and (especially) the Qing (1364-1912) eras, this book analyzes crucial moments in the formation of cultural, regional, and religious identities. The contributors examine the role of the state in a variety of environments on China's "peripheries," paying attention to shifts in law, trade, social stratification, and cultural dialogue. They find that local communities were critical participants in the shaping of their own identities and consciousness as well as the character and behavior of the state. At certain times the state was institutionally definitive, but it could also be symbolic and contingent. They demonstrate how the imperial discourse is many-faceted, rather than a monolithic agent of cultural assimilation.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004335005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
In Managing Frontiers in Qing China, historians and anthropologists explore China's imperial expansion in Inner Asia, focusing on early Qing empire-building in Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and beyond – Central Asian perspectives and comparisons to Russia's Asian empire are included. Taking an institutional-historical and historical-anthropological approach, the essays engage with two Qing agencies well-known for their governance of non-Han groups: the Lifanyuan and Libu. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the Lifanyuan and Libu, revising and assessing the state of affairs in the under-researched field of these two institutions. The contributors explore the imperial policies towards and the shifting classifications of minority groups in the Qing Empire, explicitly pairing and comparing the Lifanyuan and Libu as in some sense cognate agencies. This text offers insight into how China's past has continued to inform its modern policies, as well as the geopolitical make-up of East Asia and beyond. Contributors include: Uradyn E. Bulag, Chia Ning, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Nicola DiCosmo, Dorothea Heuschert-Laage, Laura Hostetler, Fabienne Jagou, Mei-hua Lan, Dittmar Schorkowitz, Song Tong, Michael Weiers,Ye Baichuan, Yuan Jian, Zhang Yongjiang.
Author: Kyle J. Gardner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108840590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Reveals how British imperial border-making in the Himalayas transformed a crossroads into a borderland and geography into politics.
Author: Ronald G. Knapp
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824880048
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Until the seventeenth century, Professor Knapp reminds us, Taiwan lay obscure off the southeast coast of China-an island cloaked in anonymity and inhabited principally by aborigines. Then, rather abruptly, the island was thrust into the maelstrom of European commercial expansion in East Asia, which in its wake drew Chinese peasant pioneers across the straits to Taiwan. This is the story, told from many viewpoints, of how Taiwan was transformed over a period of three centuries from a raw frontier to a stable entity with social and economic patterns similar to those found along the coastal mainland of southeastern China.
