Marginal constituencies : Qing borderland policies and vernacular histories of five tribes on the Sino-Russian frontier
The Qing dynasty (1644-1911) extended the geographic and social boundaries of Chinese imperium by assimilating physical areas and ethnic groups that were previously at the margins or beyond the direct control of the preceding Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Channels of economic and cultural exchange gradually developed to connect these peripheral places and peoples to the nucleus of the empire. At the same time, the central government preserved their frontier status by governing them differently from the territorial core. The imperial court and other bureaucratic offices in Beijing customized the administration of each frontier region according to official perceptions about indigenous and foreign threats to Qing authority and the utility of human and material resources in the area. This dissertation seeks to fulfill two objectives. The first is to examine the development of policies to govern five tribes indigenous to the northern frontier as case studies of how the Qing government used native populations of the borderlands to demarcate and to claim these physical and political spaces as part of its domain. Beijing simultaneously considered these groups as valuable intermediaries and as vulnerable pawns in disputes with the Russian empire over their shared border
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2009
Harvard University
Dissertation Abstracts International
dissertations
xi, 417 leaves ; 29 cm
9781109066739, 1109066732
426251942
"January 2009."