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This introductory chapter discusses the relations between the Sui and Tang Empires and the surrounding Turko-Mongol pastoral nomadic peoples during the medieval period (580–800 ad). It explains the method and theory used in the present study and studies the China-Inner Asia relations, where it introduces the term “Chinese worldview.” The final part of the chapter discusses several concepts that are included in the following chapters, such as patrimonialism, the China-Inner Asia borderlands, and Sui-Tang cosmopolitanism.

This chapter serves as an introduction to Eastern Eurasian geography, military struggles, and political organization during the medieval period. It discusses the climate and geography of East Eurasia, and maps the medieval China-Inner Asia borderlands. The next few sections provide background information on the Sui- to mid-Tang dynasties and modern Turko-Mongols of Eastern Eurasia. This chapter also describes the evolving power balance in Eastern Eurasia.

Analysis of human skeletal remains helps elucidate the relationships between and among groups living along the ancient Chinese northern frontier, as well as the risks of interpersonal violence suffered by members of nomadic pastoral groups. We posit that a host of complex interactions occurred as nomads migrated into and out of contested zones near the borders of Chinese expansion, with tensions both between the nomads and the Chinese and among the nomadic tribes themselves. Patterns of trauma found on human remains from four sites give valuable evidence of the extent and types of injuries experienced, along with their impact on health in different regions of the northern frontier. Particular emphasis is given to the Jinggouzi (井沟子) burial sample, comprising the remains of pastoralists who had recently migrated to what is now Inner Mongolia during the Late Bronze Age. By comparing trauma profiles of Jinggouzi individuals with trauma profiles of samples from other northern frontier regions (Manchuria and Xinjiang), we gain new insights into the nature of conflict and other forms of interregional interaction among the nomadic societies of the area, as well as between those societies and imperial China.

This chapter offers a brief review of dominant approaches to placing early modern China in its world context, discussing major findings, ongoing debates, and emerging challenges. Attention to different geographic regions, periods of time, and topics of research, including economic, political, and cultural and intellectual history, have led to competing judgements about the degree to which the Qing Empire was integrated into global developments. Against this background, and with reference to the case of the Qing official Ghombojab, it argues that the rise of global history can complement research that focus on the Qing empire or China as a whole, by emphasizing the differential impact of global forces on individual Qing subjects and their reciprocal individual contributions towards shaping those forces.

In 1854, Nicholas I officially shut down Kazan University's chairs in orientology. The Most Holy Synod in St. Petersburg then authorized the Missionary Division at the Kazan Theological Academy, with sections devoted to the languages and religions of the Russian empire's Eastern minorities. The Theological Academy was established in 1723 as the archbishop's Slavic-Latin School for priests' sons and eventually became a proper seminary with a special duty for the East. Orientology at Russian universities generally focused on the East's major cultures to the detriment of Russia's own Asian minorities, but the emphasis shifted at the Theological Academy. A leading figure in Kazan's nineteenth-century missionary work was Nikolai Ivanovich Il'minskii, a seminarian, orientologist, and the leading educator of Kazan's Kriashen. A product of the Russian Orthodox Church's institutions of higher education in Kazan was Father Hyacinth, considered the founder of Russian Sinology, who produced a prolific series of works about China and Inner Asia.

The Mongolian polity was the greatest pre-industrial empire, and second in the world history after the British Empire. It was established by the out-of-nowhere people of pastoral nomads. Nevertheless, the Mongolian Empire has played a great role in the world. Its founder, Genghis Khan, was even named the man of the second millennium. After termination of the murderous conquests, the Mongols became the trigger for building the global communication system in which gas stimulated the technological, cultural, and ideological exchanges between the civilizations of the Old World and contributed indirectly to the bubonic plague. The medieval Mongolian globalization laid the groundwork for subsequent technological growth, the age of discovery, and the rise of the West.

This chapter discusses how the emperor increasingly used to the social role of the trülku for his own political agenda. It details the how important control of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism was in the Inner Asian power play between the Chinese emperor and the Tibetan regent; the regent's efforts to resist the emperor's pressure and to persevere with his own agenda, even at the beginning of the eighteenth century; the reincarnation of the Sixth Dalai Lama; the establishment of Qing control over eastern Tibet; Tibet's civil war; and the exile of the Dalai Lama in eastern Tibet for six year beginning in 1728.

The First Zaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinley (Tib. Blo bzang ’phrin las, Mong. Luvsanphrinle, 1642–1715) was and remains known as one of the most prolific Mongolian Buddhist masters in history. Despite his desire to stay in Tibet to continue his study of Buddhism, he was sent back to Mongolia to spread the Dharma among the Mongols by the Fifth Dalai Lama, which sets his experience aside from many of his peers. His autobiography translated and presented here is the first known Tibetan language biographical work authored by a Mongolian and went on to have a huge influence on Buddhist biographical writing in Mongolian lands. Although following what the author saw to be the idealized model of Tibetan Buddhist biographical writing, this work also weaves in stylistically Mongolian characteristics. The author’s own experience contained within, as well as the way in which this life story is presented, created a piece of writing that is able to personify the amalgamated Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhist world of the seventeenth century.