Description
Book SynopsisWith 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.
Trade ReviewThis book begins to fill in a 'black hole' in Chinese history with a critical examination of the history of Chinese expansion into and colonization of the southwest. It is the first study that even attempts to place the indigenous Tai peoples at the center of the story, analyzing how they lived before the Chinese state arrived and how they reacted to the Chinese colonial project. Future research on China's frontiers will be measured against it precisely because Giersch presents the Yunnan frontier in its totality. This original contribution advances our conceptual approach to China's frontiers, casting an illuminating light on the fascinating history of the southwest. -- John Herman, Virginia Commonwealth University
In a superb study of the expansion of the Qing empire on its southwestern frontier, C. Patterson Giersch elegantly describes how the Qing rulers first conquered and then penetrated southern Yunnan. He does not see Qing integration of this region as an inevitable, smooth process, but instead emphasizes the contests between multiple players from many different states and ethnic groups as they battled for military, economic, and cultural influence. This work should attract the interest of scholars of many other frontiers, as well. Giersch shows how Qing policies reflected and differed from the practices of Southeast Asian and European imperial states, and how this region of the empire constantly kept in touch with global movements of people, commodities, and capital. He very effectively puts China in the wider world. -- Peter C. Perdue, MIT, author of
China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central EurasiaTable of ContentsAbbreviations Note on Transliteration Introduction PART I: POLITICAL AND MILITARY TRANSFORMATIONS 1. A Traveler's Tale 2. New Frontier Militarism 3. Ambiguity of the Barbarian 4. Asian Empires PART II: DEMOGRAPHIC, ECONOMIC, AND CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS 5. A Motley Throng 6. A Song for Tea 7. "Barbarians" Still? Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index
