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China's Last Imperial Frontier: Late Qing Expansion in Sichuan's Tibetan Borderlands . Xiuyu Wang . Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto and Plymouth : Lexington Books , 2011. xv + 291 pp. £49.95; $80.00. ISBN 978-0-7391-6809-7
Book Reviews
The wars launched in Kham (the eastern part of the Tibetan world) in 1905 by Qing officials determined to replace local Khampa leadership with Chinese bureaucracy are of great importance in Chinese and Tibetan history. They fundamentally altered relations between China and Tibet, and Samuel Adshead mused that without the ruinously expensive wars in Kham, Sichuan might have avoided its 1911 crisis and the "empire might have escaped revolution" (Province and Politics in Late Imperial China, Curzon, 1984). Xiuyu Wang's book on the origins of the campaigns, their prosecution by Zhao Erfeng, and the subsequent attempts to reshape Kham's government, economy and culture joins a relatively significant body of work on the subject (for example, the books by Louis Sigel and Adshead; and articles by Elliot Sperling and Dahpon David Ho). But there are enough reinterpretations and new details in Wang's book to make it interesting to scholars who work on Sino-Tibetan relations, and significant for those who study Qing and Chinese rule over other non-Han territory more generally.
A minor problem that one feels bound to mention before moving onto the more important things: the map on p. 2 is too small, and many of its labels illegible....