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This chapter charts the evolution of jurisdiction over foreigners in Qing China from the late nineteenth century through the Sino-British “Chefoo Convention” of 1876, which was the last British treaty to deal with extraterritoriality to any large extent before the turn of the century. Prior to the Opium War, the Qing Empire granted foreigners far more legal autonomy than the contemporary Ottoman Empire did under the “Capitulations,” a series of treaties between the Sublime Porte and Western nations, which were concluded from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.

This chapter examines how legal pluralism and extraterritoriality contributed to shape the public debate in China and Japan in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It contrasts official Chinese and Japanese responses to a series of widely publicized consular courts cases and shows that the Japanese authorities were much more successful in mobilizing public opinion against extraterritoriality than the Qing Empire was. The chapter argues that one of the reasons for the Japanese success was the fact that the Japanese state had created a relatively unified citizenry by abolishing all traces of legal pluralism.

This chapter describes the rulership that functioned during the Qing Empire. It notes that the empire is considered to have been founded by, controlled by, or given a certain political and cultural cast by, the Manchus in the early seventeenth century. The chapter explains that during the eighteenth century, the Qing reached its height of political control over Manchuria, Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan, Tibet, and China, as well as the states recognizing Qing superiority in the system of court visitation, sometimes called the tributary system. It adds that this golden age was represented in the rile of the Qianlong emperor, the most “Confucian,” “sinified,” or simply grandest of the Qing rulers. After his death, the empire went into a decline during which it became vulnerable to the expansionist, colonialist, and imperialist actions of Europe, the United States, and eventually Japan.

Desideri flees the capital to escape the Zünghar invasion of 1717 in the fourth chapter, which will largely be taken up by Desideri's narrative of the carnage that followed. This chapter outlines the dominant ideological and political myths of seventeenth and early eighteenth century Tibet, especially those involving the Dalai Lamas, and addresses the missionary's understanding of the uniquely Tibetan understanding of reincarnation. This approach synthesizes much of the new research being done in Tibetan Studies today and introduces the reader to many of the ideas that the young Jesuit would later present to his European readers. The violent political struggles of seventeenth and eighteenth‐century Tibet also allow the reader to discern the political motives behind Desideri's writing that will be outlined in the fifth chapter and will set the stage for an assessment of his capacities as an historian.

This chapter details how, after the rise of Indian tea triggered a collapse of its Chinese rivals, the Chinese trade underwent its own crisis of economic principles in the 1890s. It provides an overview of economic ideas during the high age of the Qing Empire, which entailed a sophisticated grasp of economic growth revolving around the utility of the soil and the importance of trade. The stimulus of competition from South Asian tea, crystallized in the crisis, pushed Qing thinkers to abandon dominant mercantilist notions of wealth as something acquired through overseas trade and instead visualize it as something produced by labor. Indeed, global competition compelled a minority of Qing officials to see wealth as something socially determined, originating from the skill and productivity of human activity, hence capable of infinite expansion through innovation. The economic thinker and Qing bureaucrat Chen Chi was exemplary of this transformation. He penned an influential memorial on reviving the tea trade, with much of his analysis tied to a simultaneous engagement with the translated works of English economist Henry Fawcett, ultimately arriving at the same classical tenets of “value” outlined by W. N. Lees in India.

It was in Shanxi Province that the Incredible Famine threw its longest shadow. The province lost its pre-famine population of between fifteen and seventeen million people to starvation, disease, and flight. Before the famine struck, however, Shanxi had been thriving. As one of the few parts of China not severely affected by one of the three gigantic mid-nineteenth-century rebellions, in the early 1870s, the province was home to the lucrative Hedong saltworks, an impressive banking network, and merchants powerful enough to dominate China's trade with Mongolia and Russia. This chapter examines how the drought that struck between 1876 and 1878 resulted in a devastating famine that brought such a wealthy and strategically important part of the empire to its knees. It considers how the formidable challenges facing the Qing Empire in the late nineteenth century hampered the state's ability to prevent a drought from escalating into a major famine.

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.

This chapter examines historical writing under the Qing Empire. It details the comprehensive and energetic pursuit of a documentary legacy for the Qing Empire that would integrate origins, identity, righteous conquest, and the fate of civilizations into a coherent imperial narrative. The undertaking relied heavily upon the development of the fanglve genre, complemented by administrative histories, historical compendia, and lyric meditations through the media of poetry, architecture, landscaping, curating, and ritual performance.

This chapter details events that ultimately led to the incorporation of Tibet into the Qing Empire and its administration. These include the death of the fifth dalai Lama in 1682, which was kept secret by his regent for a good fifteen years—not only from the Tibetan public but also from the emperor and the aristocracy of the various Mongol tribes; and the disappearance into retreat in 1651 of zhapdrung Ngawang Namgyel, who, like the Fifth Dalai Lama, had established the “union of religion and politics” in Bhutan, and whose death was not revealed until around 1705. In effect, during these years the Tibetan and Bhutanese states were both ruled by corpses, in a manner of speaking.

Lexicography in China under the rule of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was intimately tied up with empire. The Qing Empire was plurilingual; with the support of the Chinese elite, dominated by scholar-officials from the lower Yangtze region, the Manchu khans ruled as Confucian emperors, at the same time safeguarding a place for their own language in the polity. In this context, the bilingual elite undertook various lexicographical projects aspiring to greater integration of the empire’s main languages: Manchu and Chinese. Within this context, Mårten Söderblom Saarela addresses Banihûn’s and Pu-gong’s Qing-Han wenhai (Manchu–Chinese Literary Ocean), a reworking of an eighteenth-century poetic Chinese dictionary. He compares this bilingual project to an unfinished Chinese–French dictionary inspired by the same source. At a time of linguistic and social change in China, Banihûn and Pu-gong aspired to further integrate the empire’s two literary languages and thereby to provide a resource for lettered bannermen such as themselves and to maintain what they knew to be the fragile equilibrium of relations between these languages.

This chapter presents a 1931 survey of Buddhist institutional life in Outer and Inner Mongolia and in Buryatia. It is a ground-level view by a Buddhist author writing from within the increasingly embattled monastic worlds of socialist Mongolia, soon to be erased by state purges. Like a few other chapters in this volume, it is drawn from the writings of the Khalkha polymath of the revolutionary era, Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937). This survey is embedded in his famous 1931 history of the Dharma in Mongol lands, The Golden Book (Tib. Gser kyi deb ther), the last history of such scope and purpose by a Khalkha monk prior to the devastating socialist state violence of the late 1930s. The survey comes after synthetic presentations of the early, middle, and later spread of the Dharma into Mongol lands, the latter tied inextricably to the Géluk school and the Qing formation that had collapsed in 1911/1912. The survey translated here is a final statement about the translocalism that defined Buddhism in early twentieth-century Mongolia, where most major monasteries were woven at once into local political and social landscapes while also consciously mediating trans-Eurasian ritual, intellectual, and material culture traditions.

This chapter deals with the Sino-French War of 1883–85 in Tonkin, an area in modern Vietnam that was colonized by the French, with an eye to shedding light as to how cultural and semantic factors interfered with the way the French and Chinese administrations perceived, interpreted, and reacted to the diplomatic and military events that led to the Sino-French war. It suggests that there was a deep communication chasm between the French and Chinese administrations and profound differences in their respective philosophies. There was diplomatic doubletalk, which was further accentuated by the ideological incoherence of the French administration and the atypical organization and functioning of the Qing Empire and particularly the Tsungli Yamen, which was basically the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The ultimate question is how the proactive, amoral Western concept of international legal order could ever coexist peacefully with the Chinese traditional ideas of justice, reasonableness, and Confucian passivity.

This chapter presents selections from the vast oeuvre of the eighteenth-century polymath Čaqar Gebši Luvsančültem (1740–1810). Among Mongolian, Siberian, and Tibetan Buddhists to this day, the Čaqar Gebši is honored as an authoritative, genre-fixing translator, philosopher, astronomer, physician, pilgrim, and biographer who helped mediate the Qing imperial formation in Mongol lands. Translated in this chapter are selections from his miscellaneous writings focused on producing a Buddhism fit for Čaqar (only relatively recently and brutally incorporated into the Qing) by extolling topics such as the routinization of daily life for Buddhist scholastics, hair-splitting philosophical distinctions important for the Géluk tradition, and synthetic (as well as revisionist) histories of Tibetan and Chinggisid royal lineages, warlords, and eminent monks who collectively brought the Dharma to Čaqar lands. Also included is a brief but fascinating set of meditative and liturgical exercises meant to accompany the reading of Čaqar Gebši’s famous biography of Tsongkhapa.

This chapter explores the socio-historical and political background in China into which Twain was first introduced. Brought to Chinese readers by Liang Qichao during his exile in Japan in late Qing China, Twain’s work indispensably contributed to the early process of transnationalism in the Chinese literary community across China, Japan, and the US. Huckleberry Finn, in particular, was used to revolutionize literature, language, and society in China as the nation was undergoing a series of westernization reforms and as a political tool during the Cold War era. Nevertheless, the travels of Huck Finn from the Chinese Mainland to Hong Kong and Taiwan during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) suggests that translating Twain’s work in these places functioned in part as a means of distancing themselves from communism and Chinese civilization as it was being constructed in the Mainland at the time.

This chapter presents a unique devotional biography from Khalkha by Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) about his beloved guru Sanjaa (1837–1906). Completed in the late summer of 1914, some three years after the collapse of the Qing and the formation of a perilous Mongolian autonomous theocracy in 1911, Beautifying Ornament provides rare details about the life of an otherwise little-known Mongolian luminary from the late imperial period. Written in Tibetan and employing literary genres shared by that time across the Tibeto-Mongolian cultural interface, Beautifying Ornament sets narrative details proper to an “outer biography” (Tib. phyi rnam) into devotional verse (Tib. bstod) joined with a concluding “seven-limb prayer” liturgy directed to the departed Sanjaa for regular recitation by his disciples. Beautifying Ornament also illuminates the understudied globalisms of nineteenth-century Mongolian Buddhist life that sustained zones of contact and exchange between Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, Nepalese, Japanese, Russian, and Indian Buddhist communities, scholastic institutions, and pilgrimage sites.