Lecture | China Seminar
“The Heavenly Deities Supervise All 天神共鑒”: The Qing Adjudication of the Feud between the Rma Lho Khoshud Mongols and the Mdo ba Tibetans, 1862-1882
- Date
- Thursday 15 May 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
This presentation investigates a complex, violent, and protracted conflict between the banner communities of the Mongol junwang based in the high-altitude pasturelands to the south of the Yellow River (Tib. Rma lho, Ch. Henan 河南, much of which is now divided between Rste khog County and the Rma lho Mongol Autonomous County, Qinghai Province) and the neighboring Tibetan Mdo ba (Ch. Duo wa多哇) community, during the years 1876 to 1882. The reconstruction of this conflict from over seventy distinct archival documents from the local administration of Qinghai and Gansu province, as well as other related historical materials, supports several interrelated arguments about the presence of Qing civil and military officials in local society and indigenous strategies of governance and dispute management. First, the case illuminates the ways in which local actors effected changes to legal and governing norms by utilizing Qing state resources. We explain the roles that a variety of local elites (nang so of Repkong, the Jamyang Zhepa, Mongol nobility, etc.) played as part of the imperial governing apparatus and how they tried to exercise the “disciplinary sovereignty” of the emperor. Second, the case exposed institutional and personal conflicts between Qing officials—the Qing state was not a unitary or monolithic actor in the Tibeto-Mongol borderlands. And third, it complicates anachronistic interpretations of Tibetan and Mongol conflict based on modern notions of ethnicity. We observe how individuals and groups moved strategically between local administrative structures to pursue their own agendas. This presentation summarizes the findings of a collaborative project undertaken by Max Oidtmann (LMU), Zhang Rong (张蓉, Chang'an University), and Yang Hongwei (杨红伟, Lanzhou University).