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Amid the Clouds and Mist: China's Colonization of Guizhou, 1200-1700. By John E. Herman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007.
China's southwest has received increasing more attention since the 1990s, especially from the younger generation of Chinese history scholars in the West. John E. Herman, who has built his reputation on the studies of the tusi (native chieftain) system in southwest China, is surely one of the most well-known. This book revisits China's march towards the tropics by bringing the Nasu Yi of Guizhou, a periphery of a periphery, to our attention.
With a time span of half a millennium (1200-1700), the book is divided into six main chapters. Chapter 1 provides the historical background of the Mu'ege Yi people in the Shuixi region (Guizhou); Chapter 2 discusses the brief supremacy of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in Shuixi, and the subsequent return of the Azhe patriclan at the end of the thirteenth century; Chapter 3 outlines the political economy of the Mu'ege before the Ming conquest; Chapter 4 analyzes the tusi system in the region under Ming colonization; Chapter 5 moves from the imperial colonial enterprises to the indigenous creative response; Chapter 6 describes how the chaotic Ming-Qing transition and the early Qing reduced the autonomy of tusi and eventually brought an end...