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In Pamirian Crossroads and Beyond Hermann Kreutzmann offers insights in his fieldwork-based research in High Asia during four decades.
A human-geographical perspective is pursued in which case studies about colonial and post-colonial boundary-making, exchange relations of mountain communities across international borders, the transformation of agricultural and pastoral practices and the effects of modernisation strategies in neighbouring countries are centred in the Hindukush, Wakhan Quadrangle, Pamirian Crossroads, Karakoram Mountains and Himalaya. Empirical evidence is augmented by in-depth archival research, thus allowing a perspective from the 19th to the 21st century.
By shifting the focus to mountain peripheries and emphasising spaces in between urban centres of power in Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and the Central Asian Republics different arenas of confrontation and effective changes emerge.
A Critique of the Sinocentric Paradigm
Devised to legitimize the Republic of China’s claim over Inner Asia, the Sinocentric paradigm stems from the Open Door Policy and Chinese nationalism. Advanced against the conquest theory, and rationalized as the pathfinding ecological theory, it is an evolutionary materialist scheme that became the vision of history.
Exposing the initial agenda of this paradigm and revealing its fundamental contradictions, The Nomadic Leviathan debunks it as a myth. Resurrecting the conquest theory, and reinforcing it with the idea of extrahuman transportation, this book places pastoralism at the origin of the state and civilization, and the Eurasian steppe at the center of human history; the political emerges as the primary and fundamental order defining the social and economic.
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This first and only English translation of Rong Xinjiang’s The Silk Road and Cultural Exchanges Between East and West is a collection of 28 papers on the history of the Silk Road and the interactions among the peoples and cultures of East and Central Asia, including the so-called Western Regions in modern-day Xinjiang. Each paper is a masterly study that combines information obtained from historical records with excavated materials, such as manuscripts, inscriptions and artefacts. The new materials primarily come from north-western China, including sites in the regions of Dunhuang, Turfan, Kucha, and Khotan. The book contains a wealth of original insights into nearly every aspect of the complex history of this region.
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Dunhuang: China’s traditional northwest frontier and overland conduit of exchange with the Old World. Jao Tsung-i: China’s last great traditional man of letters, polymath, and pioneer of comparative humanistic inquiry during Hong Kong’s global heyday. Jao and Dunhuang had a special relationship that this book makes accessible in English for the first time. Inside, Jao proposes an entirely new school of Chinese landscape painting, reconsiders Dunhuang’s oldest manuscripts as its newest research field, and explores topics ranging from comparative religion to medieval multimedia.
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Commissioned by the Qianlong emperor in 1751, the Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples (Huang Qing zhigong tu 皇清職貢圖), is a captivating work of art and an ideological statement of universal rule best understood as a cultural cartography of empire. This translation of the ethnographic texts accompanied by a full-color reproduction of Xie Sui’s (謝遂) hand-painted scroll helps us to understand the conceptualization of imperial tributary relationships the work embodies as rooted in both dynastic history and the specifics of Qing rule.
Chinese Policies and the Ethnic Turn in Inner Mongolian Politics, 1900-1930
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How did inter-ethnic solidarity become attenuated in the era of the Chinese imperial transformation (1900-1930)? Based on Inner Mongolian cases, this book examines the transformations effective in the policy domains of land affairs, military organization, and law, which were initiated to strengthen state centralization, yet resulted in the sharpening of ethnic boundaries.
Using unpublished archival sources, this book benefits from three key strengths. It addresses the question of Mongol-Han relationship in the early Republican period (1911-1930), it illuminates the details of imperial administration and its changes along with the shift of the regime, and it explores the theoretical potentials of the near frontier approach and positions the Chinese imperial transition within a comparative perspective.
Qarakhanid Roads to China reconsiders the diplomacy, trade and geography of transcontinental networks between Central Asia and China from the 10th to the 12th centuries and challenges the concept of “the Silk Road crisis” in the period between the fall of the Tang Dynasty and the rise of the Mongols. Utilizing a broad range of Islamic and Chinese primary sources together with archaeological data, Dilnoza Duturaeva demonstrates the complexity of interaction along the Silk Roads and beyond that, revolutionizes our understanding of the Qarakhanid world and Song-era China’s relations with neighboring regions.
Read The Taiji Government and you will discover a bold and original revisionist interpretation of the formation of the Qing imperial constitution. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which portrays the Qing empire as a Chinese bureaucratic state that colonized Inner Asia, this book contends quite the reverse. It reveals the Qing as a Warrior State, a Manchu-Mongolian aristocratic union and a Buddhist caesaropapist monarchy. In painstaking detail, brushstroke by brushstroke, the author urges you to picture how the Mongolian aristocratic government, the Inner Asian military-oriented numerical divisional system, the technique of conquest rule, and the Mongolian doctrine of a universal Buddhist empire together created the last of the Inner Asian empires that conquered and ruled what is now China.
The Huihui Yaofang was an encyclopedia of Near Eastern medicine compiled under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty for the benefit of themselves and the then Chinese medical establishments. Some 15% of the work survives, from a Ming Dynasty edition, and is here translated for the first time into English. We extensively introduce the translation with introductions situating it within the history of western and Chinese medicine, and provide critical apparatus for understanding. We provide accounts of the medicines and foods, with comparisons to other works of the time and to modern folk uses of these medicines in the Middle East. We show that the work is solidly western Asian, specifically derived from Persian-speaking Central Asia, and is adapted to Chinese use in several ways but without losing its western character.
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This book is an outstanding work of scholarship, which builds on a long history of research and publication in this field dating to the 1890s. The author has made extensive use of Chinese sources in the original and prepared a new edition of the Old Turkic inscriptions. It also provides new views on the dating and authorship of the inscriptions. In short, it is the leading edition for scholarly use by Turkologists, but is also open to those interested in the history of the Early Turks and Medieval Central Eurasia. An essential source book and reference work.