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China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. By PETER C. PERDUE. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. xx, 725 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
This is an ambitious study, spanning more than a century and taking in more than one continent and three large states, Qing China, Muscovite Russia, and (lying between the two) the Zunghar confederation in northern Xinjiang (otherwise known as Zungharia). Its primary focus is on China during the "high Qing"-from Kangxi to Qianlong-and on the consolidation of Manchu rule in China proper and its extension into Inner Asia (or, as Peter Perdue prefers, Central Eurasia) at the expense of, one after another, the Eastern Mongols (e.g., the Khalkas), the Tibetans, the Western Mongols (notably the Zunghars), and the Turkic oasis dwellers of southern Xinjiang. Of these various Central Eurasian peoples, it is the Zunghars who occupy center stage; the others are generally mentioned only in passing.
The Zunghars were a subset of a Western Mongol group known as the Oirats. They emerged as an independent power north of the Tianshan range in the mid-160Os and, under the able leadership of Galdan, Tsewang Rabdan, and Galdan Tseren in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, united the Western Mongols, created a "state" (or, at the very least, "an...