Yokes of Gold and Threads of Silk: Sino-Tibetan competition for authority in early twentieth century Kham

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT RELYEA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indirect Influence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

AbstractBeginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day.

Orphans of the Empire: Lhasa’s Chinese Community from the Qing Era to the Early Twentieth Century

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042096992
Author(s):  
Huasha Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Chinese Population ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Academic Assessment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This article analyzes the transformation of Lhasa’s Chinese community from the embodiment of an expansionist power in the early eighteenth century to the orphan of a fallen regime after the Qing Empire’s demise in 1911. Throughout the imperial era, this remote Chinese enclave represented Qing authority in Tibet and remained under the metropole’s strong political and social influence. Its members intermarried with the locals and adopted many Tibetan cultural traits. During the years surrounding the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, this community played a significant role in a series of interconnected political and ethnic confrontations that gave birth to the two antagonistic national bodies of Tibet and China. The community’s history and experiences challenge not only the academic assessment that Tibet’s Chinese population had fully assimilated into Tibetan society by the twentieth century but also the widespread image of pre-1951 Lhasa as a harmonious town of peaceful ethnic coexistence.

The Translation of European Astronomical Works into Tibetan in the Early Eighteenth Century

Inner Asia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongdan Lobsang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Tycho Brahe

It has long been assumed that European scientific knowledge arrived in Tibet with the agents of the British Empire in the early twentieth century and furthermore that Tibetans did not engage with scientific knowledge until recent years. However, this is far from the case; from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards Tibetans not only translated a great number of Jesuit astronomical works into Tibetan by order of the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722), they also reformed one of the calendars in use in Amdo using the principles described by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). In this paper I look at how the relevant translations were done, by whom and in what historical context. I shall also explore the process by which the Jesuit-inspired astronomical and calendar turned out to be the catalyst for the adoption, reformation and manufacture of the Qing imperial calendar in Amdo.

The Kelmendi

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-37
Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Self Defence

The clan or tribe (‘fis’) system was fundamental to life in the northern Albanian highlands (Malësi e Madhe), and the Kelmendi were the most important of all the clans. This essay traces the story of their origin and development, and explains how and why they acquired their special pre-eminence over a much larger group of clans. Like the others, they began in the fifteenth century as a grouping, for self-defence purposes, around one prominent family. Unlike the others, they were given a special role by the Ottomans: derbend status, which meant that they functioned as armed guards of mountain passes and roads over a large area. This gave them a stronger collective identity, the privilege of bearing arms and the ability to extend their influence over other clans. The Kelmendi were active in many seventeenth-century revolts, and in the early eighteenth century the Ottomans tried to control them by means of a policy of mass deportation. Nevertheless they remained a dominant presence in the area until the early twentieth century.

Handel to Tempah

Migrant City ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 281-306
Author(s):  
Panikos Panayi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Level ◽  
Cultural Transfer ◽  
External Influences ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Evolution Of Music

This chapter explores how migrants have contributed to the evolution of music in London. Despite episodes of xenophobia in the London musical scene, xenophilia became stronger, partly driven by the fact that both music and musicians inevitably migrate. This is so that, while national traditions of music may emerge, the process of cultural transfer involving both sound and people mean that such traditions cannot remain sealed off from external influences, even if they may develop national-level identities, at least in the short run. While music and musicians crossed European boundaries, during the twentieth century both performers and their tunes have increasingly spanned global and consequently racial divides. The German assertion that nineteenth-century Britain constituted a ‘Land ohne Musik’ (land without music), while an exaggeration, partly explains the arrival of foreign musicians to Victorian London and the eras before and since. The constant settlement and visits by musicians to the British capital since the early eighteenth century meant that London did not become a city without music, even if the tunes and those who played them often originated from abroad.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

North America

2021 ◽  
pp. 462-478
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Study

This chapter assesses the main strands of Edwards’s reception in North America from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Most Americans did not know much, if anything, about Edwards until decades after his death, when various—often conflicting—views of Edwards appeared. New Divinity ministers expanded his theological vison while revivalists, including Charles G. Finney, enlisted Edwards’s legacy for their purposes, and thousands of evangelicals embraced Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd. Edwards intrigued (and offended) writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his condemnation of sin caught the interest of antislavery advocates in the Civil War. His legacy helped to shape the rise of American literature as a discipline, leading to the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

Manilamen and seafaring: engaging the maritime world beyond the Spanish realm

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

AbstractAlthough the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document