Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, And the State in Late Imperial China

by Johan Elverskog

Although it is generally believed that the Manchus controlled the Mongols through their patronage of Tibetan Buddhism, scant attention has been paid to the Mongol view of the Qing imperial project. In contrast to other accounts of Manchu rule, Our Great Qing focuses not only on what images the metropole wished to project into Mongolia, but also on what images the Mongols acknowledged themselves. Rather than accepting the Manchu’s use of Buddhism, Johan Elverskog begins by questioning the static, unhistorical, and hegemonic view of political life implicit in the Buddhist explanation. By stressing instead the fluidity of identity and Buddhist practice as processes continually developing in relation to state formations, this work explores how Qing policies were understood by Mongols and how they came to see themselves as Qing subjects.

In his investigation of Mongol society on the eve of the Manchu conquest, Elverskog reveals the distinctive political theory of decentralization that fostered the civil war among the Mongols. He explains how it was that the Manchu Great Enterprise was not to win over "Mongolia" but was instead to create a unified Mongol community of which the disparate preexisting communities would merely be component parts. To foster this change, Manchu rulers sought religious sanction "from above" through the cult of Chinggis Khan and with this mandate set about to restructure the cult itself and the Mongol aristocrats as members of a unified empire. As a result, the Mongol nobility came to see themselves as representing a single community that had been rescued by the gracious Manchu rulers during the civil wars of the early seventeenth century. A key element fostering this change was the Qing court’s promotion of Gelukpa orthodoxy, which not only transformed Mongol historical narratives and rituals but also displaced the earlier vernacular Mongolian Buddhism. Finally, Elverskog demonstrates how this eighteenth-century conception of a Mongol community, ruled by an aristocracy and nourished by a Buddhist emperor, gave way to a pan-Qing solidarity of all Buddhist peoples against Muslims and Christians and to local identities that united for the first time aristocrats with commoners in a new Mongol Buddhist identity on the eve of the twentieth century.

By providing an intellectual history of Mongol self-representations in late imperial China, Our Great Qing offers an insightful analysis of the principal changes that Mongolian concepts of community, rule, and religion underwent from 1500 to 1900 while offering new insights into Qing and Buddhist history. It will be essential reading for a range of different audiences, from those working specifically in Sino-Inner Asian history to those interested more broadly in the history of empires, their peripheries, and the role of religion in communal and state formations.

Genres: History, China

242 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most helpful books I've read about political conceptions on the steppe – in any era. My main interests are earlier than Qing, but he studies the Mongols’ political traditions, with great clarity, in order to see how these were changed under Qing.

He asks the how and why questions and his emphasis is on change. He feels that the Mongols’ political organisation under Qing is seen as a fait accompli (as Qing presented it, later) so he looks at what was there before, and why Mongols let the changes happen or agreed to the changes. Or initiated the changes, because he is keen to see Mongol agency – that the Mongols weren’t passive in this process.

In the second half he looks at the Buddhist conversion. Here, too, he wants us to see that there were more stages than a history written afterwards – an official history – allows. So that before a Tibetan orthodoxy there was a Mongolian Buddhism, that might have used Mongolian for liturgy. Elverskog says, “the Mongol use of Tibetan is often compared benignly with the use of Latin in Catholic Europe,” whereas he points to “the displacement of Anglo-Saxon, Saxon and Slavic liturgies.”

This book is insistently in a Mongolian viewpoint, that he thinks has been hidden, disguised or lost in orthodox, imperial re-writes of history – which our history books haven’t yet sufficiently questioned.

Qing isn’t my area but it was a fascinating story and shed light on other phases of history. Indeed, he isn’t afraid to use analogies, widely: with British India, with the European Union, with the Christianization of Rome.

[Marissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Elverskog's writing is accessible and enjoyable, even if, like me, you might not know very much about the Qing empire or Mongolian history in the modern period. In it, Elverskog writes the history of empire from the margins, focusing not on what the imperial center wanted its domains to be, but on how the subjects themselves thought of their communities and their relation to political power.

While his argument is relevant to Mongolia as a whole, he is especially interested in Inner Mongolia under the Qing banner system. He argues that the process of reinventing Mongol communal life occurred not in a specific year, but worked itself out over decades, even centuries, of negotiation between imperial center and periphery. He also presents a significant revision to the standard narrative of Buddhism in Mongolia; showing how Mongol authors imagined their involvement first in a unique Mongolian Buddhist community, and then in an ecumenical Buddhist space encompassing the Chinese and Tibetans.

My one criticism is that Elverskog relies heavily on three centuries of historical writings to show how Mongol ideas about community underwent change--but does not extensively discuss the patronage of these works, how they were copied or disseminated, or how wide an audience they enjoyed. While some of this information may be impossible to discover, I think a deeper analysis of how textual history operated in the wider cultural milieu would have strengthened the argument.

[Tsai Wei-chieh · Rating 4 out of 5]

博論用書，用來討論清朝作為佛教帝國的研究。當然這書自然是有缺點的。如果能加入日本學者的研究成果會更好。看了一下豆瓣的評分，只能說這書的重要性被低估了。不過這大概也是因為自己是做這方面研究的吧。在美國學界這方面的書實在是少之又少。有關蒙古十八與十九世紀史學的研究基本上是被忽略的。希望未來有機會再回來這個領域吧。

[Drew Tschirki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first half very much. The second half, particularly the last two chapters, not as much.