Overview

The Qing empire and the Dalai Lama-led Geluk School of Tibetan Buddhism came into contact in the eighteenth century. Their interconnections would shape regional politics and the geopolitical history of Inner Asia for centuries to come. In Common Ground, Lan Wu analyzes how Tibetan Buddhists and the Qing imperial rulers interacted and negotiated as both sought strategies to expand their influence in eighteenth-century Inner Asia. In so doing, she recasts the Qing empire, seeing it not as a monolithic project of imperial administration but as a series of encounters among different communities. Wu examines a series of interconnected sites in the Qing empire where the influence of Tibetan Buddhism played a key role, tracing the movement of objects, flows of peoples, and circulation of ideas in the space between China and Tibet. She identifies a transregional Tibetan Buddhist knowledge network, which provided institutional, pragmatic, and intellectual common ground for both polities. Wu draws out the voices of lesser-known Tibetan Buddhists, whose writings and experiences evince an alternative Buddhist space beyond the state. She highlights interactions between Mongols and Tibetans within the Qing empire, exploring the creation of a Buddhist Inner Asia. Wu argues that Tibetan Buddhism occupied a central-but little understood-role in the Qing vision of empire. Revealing the interdependency of two expanding powers, Common Ground sheds new light on the entangled histories of political, social, and cultural ties between Tibet and China.

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Common Ground delivers fresh perspectives on the formation of the Qing Empire from the vantage of its swelling Inner Asian frontier. Admirably, Lan Wu decenters court narratives in favor of negotiated platforms through which Tibetans, Mongols, Manchus, and Chinese actors made (and unmade) visions of sovereignty, territoriality, and belonging. -- Matthew King, author of <i>Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire</i>

Common Ground delivers fresh perspectives on the formation of the Qing Empire from the vantage of its swelling Inner Asian frontier. Admirably, Lan Wu decenters court narratives in favor of negotiated platforms through which Tibetans, Mongols, Manchus, and Chinese actors made (and unmade) visions of sovereignty, territoriality, and belonging. -- Matthew King, author of <i>Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire</i> Common Ground brilliantly explores the entangled history of the Qing imperial enterprise and the Gelukpa expansion in East Asia, which produced a shared communal Buddhist identity. Wu explores the transregional knowledge network woven by Buddhist intellectuals through monasteries, texts, and images. She sheds light on the understudied peripheral regions of Amdo and Inner Mongolia and in cosmopolitan Beijing. -- Isabelle Charleux, author of <i>Nomads on Pilgrimage. Mongols on Wutaishan (China), 1800-1940</i> Common Ground is a significant addition to the study of late imperial China and Inner Asia. Reconfiguring the terms of the imperial encounter between Qing rulers and Tibetan lamas, it provides a critical contribution to discussions and interpretations of Buddhism as a rhetorical, intellectual, and political space. -- Nicola Di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study

Author Information

Lan Wu is assistant professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

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