This book begins to fill in a 'black hole' in Chinese history with a critical examination of the history of Chinese expansion into and colonization of the southwest. It is the first study that even attempts to place the indigenous Tai peoples at the center of the story, analyzing how they lived before the Chinese state arrived and how they reacted to the Chinese colonial project. Future research on China's frontiers will be measured against it precisely because Giersch presents the Yunnan frontier in its totality. This original contribution advances our conceptual approach to China's frontiers, casting an illuminating light on the fascinating history of the southwest.
John Herman, Virginia Commonwealth University In a superb study of the expansion of the Qing empire on its southwestern frontier, C. Patterson Giersch elegantly describes how the Qing rulers first conquered and then penetrated southern Yunnan. He does not see Qing integration of this region as an inevitable, smooth process, but instead emphasizes the contests between multiple players from many different states and ethnic groups as they battled for military, economic, and cultural influence. This work should attract the interest of scholars of many other frontiers, as well. Giersch shows how Qing policies reflected and differed from the practices of Southeast Asian and European imperial states, and how this region of the empire constantly kept in touch with global movements of people, commodities, and capital. He very effectively puts China in the wider world.
Peter C. Perdue, MIT, author of China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia