Chapter 4 Edicts and the Edible: Digesting Imperial Sovereignty in Lhasa
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Abstract
This chapter studies Qing imperial formation and Tibet’s integration into the Qing empire in the late eighteenth century by investigating the multilingual stone steles at Lhasa. These stone steles were mostly erected by Qing officials, generals, and emperors. Most of them recorded official edicts regarding issues of epidemic, war, and reform in the late eighteenth century. This chapter first analyzes and compares the semiotic translation and mistranslation between the steles’ Chinese and Tibetan inscriptions, applying the concept of “super-sign,” which refers to a hetero-cultural signifying chain that crisscrosses the semiotic fields of two or more languages simultaneously—such as “manmo 蠻貊/lho bal (barbarian)” in the Smallpox Stele and “Wenshu huangdi 文殊皇帝/’jam dpal byangs gong ma bdag po chen po (Mañjuśrī-emperor)” in the Kundeling Stele. Through an analysis of these super-signs, this chapter endeavors to show how a new world order and new form of emperorship gradually emerged alongside political, military, and religious processes. It then extends the semiotic analysis to an analysis of the materiality of the stone steles and the local practices surrounding them, such as the deformation of the stone steles into powders and ashes as medicine and the transformation of the powerful Mañjuśrī-emperor into a powerless husband in local gossip, and thereby unpacking the process by which the concept of imperial sovereignty from afar and above was taken onto or inside local bodies and minds. In studying these stone steles as signs in various forms, this chapter illustrates how a sense of imperial integrity and cultural multiplicity was developed through the nuanced linguistic mistranslation, ambiguous ideological superscription, insinuative material deformation, and negotiated interpretation of super-signs.