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This biography of the Ninth Panchen Lama, the second highest spiritual authority in Tibetan Buddhism, offers new insights into the tumultuous history of the relations between China and Tibet at the start of the twentieth century. It demonstrates how the Panchen Lama's flight from his monastery on the night of December 22, 1923, remains an essential characterizing event of Tibet's modern history. His flight from his country set the stage for Chinese Republican, and later Communist, control over the selection of his successors, with repercussions even today for Sino-Tibetan relations. This is the first publication in an innovative new series of research work on Asia, a collaboration between the École Française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and Silkworm Books to translate French publications for an English-language readership.
Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia... This vast area has experienced significant changes following political and socio-cultural upheavals: the Chinese occupation of Tibet since the 1950s; the opening of Nepal to the world in 1951 and the influx of large numbers of Tibetan refugees into its territory; the end of the communist era and the transition to a market economy in Mongolia, and more generally the confrontation with modernity and globalisation. Revisiting Rituals in a Changing Tibetan World examines the changes rituals have undergone and offers the reader the result of recent research based on both fieldwork and textual studies by researchers who have worked in these countries. Contributors include Hildegard Diemberger, Fabienne Jagou, Thierry Dodin, Fernanda Pirie, Nicola Schneider, Mireille Helffer, Alexander von Rospatt, Marie-Dominique Even, Robert Barnett, Katia Buffetrille
As an indispensable introduction to local history of the Khams region of Eastern Tibet/Western China (with due attention for contemporary thinking about frontier regions), this volume contains seven papers on Khams pa (Eastern Tibet) local history, representing politics, and agency and their historiographical representations on the Khams frontiers. The articles have been arranged to reflect common themes. Wim van Spengen, William Coleman and Peng Wenbin locate Khams in a broader political history, exploring the fluidity of the frontier and its turbulent dislocations, as Khampas encountered and responded to Tibetan and Chinese national projects in the early part of the twentieth century. Fabienne Jagou and Carole McGranahan shift their gaze to individual figures and their engagement with Chinese and Tibetan social politics. Peter Schwieger’s analysis of history as oral narrative positions Khams in relation to Central Tibet, as does the subject of Tsering Thar’s paper, which concerns the influence of a Bonpo lama in religious innovation.
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 towar...
Diana Lange's patient investigations have, in this wonderful piece of detective work, solved the mysteries of six extraordinary panoramic maps of routes across Tibet and the Himalayas, clearly hand-drawn in the late 1850s by a local artist, known as the British Library's Wise Collection. Diana Lange now reveals not only the previously unknown identity of the Scottish colonial official who commissioned the maps from a Tibetan Buddhist lama, but also the story of how the Wise Collection came to be in the British Library. The result is both a spectacular illustrated ethnographic atlas and a unique compendium of knowledge concerning the mid-19th century Tibetan world, as well as a remarkable account of an academic journey of discovery. It will entertain and inform anyone with an interest in this fascinating region. This large format book is lavishly illustrated in colour and includes four separate large foldout maps.
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Nomads on Pilgrimage: Mongols on Wutaishan (China), 1800-1940 is a social history of the Mongols’ pilgrimages to Wutaishan in late imperial and Republican times. In this period of economic crisis and rise of nationalism and anticlericalism in Mongolia and China, this great Buddhist mountain of China became a unique place of intercultural exchanges, mutual borrowings, and competition between different ethnic groups. Based on a variety of written and visual sources, including a rich corpus of more than 340 Mongolian stone inscriptions, it documents why and how Wutaishan became one of the holiest sites for Mongols, who eventually reshaped its physical and spiritual landscape by their rites and strategies of appropriation.
Gray Tuttle reveals the surprising role Buddhism and Buddhist leaders played in the development of the modern Chinese state and in fostering relations between Tibet and China from the Republican period (1912-1949) to the early years of Communist rule. Tuttle offers new insights on the impact of modern ideas of nationalism, race, and religion in East Asia. He draws on previously unexamined archival and governmental materials, as well as personal memoirs of Chinese politicians and Buddhist monks, and ephemera from religious ceremonies.
Conflict in a Buddhist Society presents a new way of looking at Tibet under the rule of the Dalai Lamas (1642–1959). Although this era can be clearly delineated as a distinct period in the history of Tibet, many questions remain concerning the specific form of rule established. Author Peter Schwieger attempts to make transparent the complexity and dynamics of the Dalai Lamas’ domination using the work of sociologist Niklas Luhman (1927–1998) as his theoretical starting point. Luhman’s systems theory allows Schwieger to approach Tibetan history and culture as a remarkable effort to create—under times of great conflict and stress and using uncommon means—a stable social and politic...
This book introduces the reader to different cases of cultural intersections between Tibet and China in the field of Buddhism. The ten chapters provide a series of insights into Sino-Tibetan exchanges within religious practices and doctrines, material culture and iconography. Spanning from pre-modern encounters in Central Asia to contemporary forms of Sino-Tibetan hybridity in Chinese-speaking environments, Sino-Tibetan Buddhism Across the Ages produces further evidence that, beginning with the very introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, there were constant and fruitful contacts and blending between the Buddhist traditions developing in China and those of Tibet. Contributors are Urs App, Ester Bianchi, Isabelle Charleux, Martino Dibeltulo Concu, Alison Denton Jones, Weirong Shen, Penghao Sun, Wei Wu, Fan Zhang, and Linghui Zhang.