Based on previously unopened Mongolian archives, Young Mongols and Vigilantes is a vivid narrative of the underground world of pan-Mongolist agitation in Inner Mongolia that offers new insight into the social origins and international connections of Mongol nationalism in China. The print edition is available as a set of two volumes (9789004126077).

Based on previously unopened Mongolian archives, Young Mongols and Vigilantes is a vivid narrative of the underground world of pan-Mongolist agitation in Inner Mongolia that offers new insight into the social origins and international connections of Mongol nationalism in China. The print edition is available as a set of two volumes (9789004126077).

In Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia's Interregnum Decades, 1911-1931 , a vivid narrative of the underground world of pan-Mongolist agitation in China, the author shows how the paradoxical legacy of China's New Policies reforms left ethnically-based nationalism as the only common denominator for political action. In the turbulent years of China's warlord republic, educated Mongol nationalists and rural vigilantes sought to unify Inner Mongolia with the independent state in Mongolia proper. Brought together by the Soviet embassy, the nationalists fought for an autonomous Inner Mongolia until their final doomed uprisings of 1928. Based on previously closed Mongolian archives, Young Mongols and Vigilantes is a path-breaking contribution to the history of Soviet involvement in Inner Mongolia, Chinese Communist nationality policy, and the social history of multi-ethnic Inner Mongolia. The print edition is available as a set of two volumes (9789004126077).

This book offers the first in-depth examination of Japanese-Mongolian relations from the late nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century and in the process repositions Mongolia in Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese relations. Beginning in 1873, with the intrepid journey to Mongolia by a group of Buddhist monks from one of Kyoto’s largest orders, the relationship later included groups and individuals from across Japanese society, with representatives from the military, academia, business and the bureaucracy. Throughout the book, the interplay between these various groups is examined in depth, arguing that to restrict Japan’s relationship with Mongolia to merely the strategic and as an adjunct to Manchuria, as has been done in other works, neglects important facets of the relationship, including the cultural, religious and economic. It does not, however, ignore the strategic importance of Mongolia to the Japanese military. The author considers the cultural diplomacy of the Zenrin kyôkai, a Japanese quasi-governmental humanitarian organization whose activities in inner Mongolia in the 1930s and 1940s have been almost completely ignored in earlier studies and whose operations suggest that Japanese-Mongolian relations are quite distinct from other Asian peoples. Accordingly, the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of Japanese activities in a part of Asia that figured prominently in pre-war and wartime Japanese strategic and cultural thinking.

The Transnational Cult of Mount Wutai explores the pan-East Asian significance of sacred Mount Wutai from the Northern Dynasties to the present.

After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject. Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood takes up the perspective of the polymath Zava Damdin (1867–1937): a historian, mystic, logician, and pilgrim whose life and works straddled the Qing and its socialist aftermath, between the monastery and the party scientific academy. Drawing on contacts with figures as diverse as the Dalai Lama, mystic monks in China, European scholars inventing the field of Buddhist studies, and a member of the Bakhtin Circle, Zava Damdin labored for thirty years to protect Buddhist tradition against what he called the “bloody tides” of science, social mobility, and socialist party antagonism. Through a rich reading of his works, King reveals that modernity in Asia was not always shaped by epochal contact with Europe and that new models of Buddhist life, neither imperial nor national, unfolded in the post-Qing ruins. The first book to explore countermodern Buddhist monastic thought and practice along the Inner Asian frontiers during these tumultuous years, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood illuminates previously unknown religious and intellectual legacies of the Qing and offers an unparalleled view of Buddhist life in the revolutionary period.

The author's purpose in writing this book is to use the Mongolian question to illuminate much larger issues of twentieth-century Asian history: how war, revolution, and great-power rivalries induced or restrained the formation of nationhood and territoriality. He thus continues the argument he made in Frontier Passages that on its way to building a communist state, the CCP was confronted by a series of fundamental issues pertinent to China's transition to nation-statehood. The book's focus is on the Mongolian question, which ran through Chinese politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Between the Revolution of 1911 and the Communists' triumph in 1949, the course of the Mongolian question best illustrates the genesis, clashes, and convergence of Chinese and Mongolian national identities and geopolitical visions.

Music cultures today in rural and urban Mongolia and Inner Mongolia emerge from centuries-old pastoralist practices that were reshaped by political movements in the twentieth century. Mongolian Sound Worlds investigates the unique sonic elements, fluid genres, social and spatial performativity, and sounding objects behind new forms of Mongolian music--forms that reflect the nation’s past while looking towards its globalized future. Drawing on fieldwork in locations across the Inner Asian region, the contributors report on Mongolia’s genres and musical landscapes; instruments like the morin khuur, tovshuur, and Kazakh dombyra; combined fusion band culture; and urban popular music. Their broad range of concerns include nomadic herders’ music and instrument building, ethnic boundaries, heritage-making, ideological influences, nationalism, and global circulation. A merger of expert scholarship and eyewitness experience, Mongolian Sound Worlds illuminates a diverse and ever-changing musical culture. Contributors: Bayarsaikhan Badamsuren, Otgonbaayar Chuulunbaatar, Andrew Colwell, Johanni Curtet, Charlotte D’Evelyn, Tamir Hargana, Peter K. Marsh, K. Oktyabr, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jennifer C. Post, D. Tserendavaa, and Sunmin Yoon

Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts examines the key role of the individual in the development of traditional Chinese performing arts such as music and dance. These artists and their artistic works–the "faces of tradition"–come to represent and reconfigure broader fields of cultural production in China today. The contributors to this volume explore the ways in which performances and recordings, including singing competitions, textual anthologies, ethnographic videos, and CD albums, serve as discursive spaces where individuals engage with and redefine larger traditions and themselves. By focusing on the performance, scholarship, collection, and teaching of instrumental music, folksong, and classical dance from a variety of disciplines–these case studies highlight the importance of the individual in determining how traditions have been and are represented, maintained, and cultivated.