Relations between the ancient Turks and the Yenisei Kyrgyz at the turn of the early Middle Ages (ancient Turks at the turn of the early Middle Ages)

It is represented in an article the history of the Turks till the second half of the 1st millennium A.D., from migration period out of Central Asian steppes to boundaries of the Chinese empire and their resettlement to the Altai Mountains, when the Old Turkic state was at its greatest height, took control the number of sedentary agriculturist oases and successfully confronted the major powers of that time - Chinese Persian and Byzantine empires. Throughout the vast territory of the Sayan and Altai Mountains and Central Asian region there are represented all major types of funerary and memorial constructions of the Old Turks, which constitutes burial places according to the ritual of inhumation accompanied by riding horses or rams and memorial complexes in the form of vertically dug stone plates fences with vertically fixed stone steles. Authors of the article consider designated historical period of the Old Turkic history from the perspective of interaction of the Old Turks and Kyrgyz, who resided in the territory of Minusinsk Hollow. Mutual relations between those two peoples took various forms in different times: unabashedly hostile passively feudatory, when the Yenisei Kyrgyz preferred not to show pure resistance to the Turks. However, such instability of their own position has not disturbed the Kyrgyz to expand the range of their own vassals.

China’s Pledge to Civilise “All Under Heaven”

With China’s global rise, both its state leadership and key academics have engaged in developing a civilisational discourse for the twenty-first century partly based on ancient cosmological concepts. This article explores the meanings of and intentions behind this discourse, including its promise of a Chinese-led world order, and discusses its intended audience and international appeal. In the backdrop of theoretical debates on empires and their missions, the article claims that without a corresponding cultural appeal, China’s rising economic power and geostrategic clout are insufficient conditions to realise an empire in the classical sense. Growing inconsistencies mar the country’s imperial ambitions, such as those between a global civilising outreach and a toughening domestic embrace. Instead, imperial rhetoric is cautiously integrated in the party-state’s restoration of a Chinese “empire within,” indicating self-centredness and a lurking re-traditionalising of Chinese state power.

The “Phantasmatic” Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” and Mark Twain’s Roughing It

This chapter explores Chinatown as an ephemeral site of visual indeterminacy in the 1870s by looking at a number of Californian Chinatown accounts in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” (1878) and Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). Late-nineteenth-century Chinatown as an exhibitory locus of authentic Chinese-ness for Western tourists is paradoxically characterized by its mutability rather than realism. By examining the accounts of Jackson and Twain about the Chinese in the 1870s, the decade before the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the paper rethinks the “virtual” existence of Chinatown, its contested nature as a “phantasmatic site” for Western projections and visual consumption, which manifests the potential realization of national transformation in the mythic Orient of the new West.