Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism and the State in Late Imperial China (review)

Johan Elverskog critiques the prevailing view of Qing-Mongol relations in this important book. Relying on extensive sources in Mongolian, he provides an "intellectual history of Mongol self-representation" (p. 169) from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Not only does he revise common understandings of the role of the Mongols under the Qing, he offers valuable insights for scholars interested in other imperial formations.

The conventional view is that the Qing rulers, particularly the Manchu elite, promoted Buddhism as a tool to ensure Mongol submission, and enforced their domination with military force, economic penetration, and "bribes" of titles, ranks, and subventions to the Mongol nobility. The Qing successfully defanged the most dangerous age-old enemy of all Chinese dynasties, the nomadic pastoralists of Central Eurasia, through this fatal combination of economic and military incentives. The "five baits" of Han dynasty strategy softened up the Mongol elite, while the hard policy of military conquest removed their offensive power. Mongolian nationalists, Qing historians, and foreigners such as Lattimore and Amiot who see Buddhism as a weakening force have endorsed this view.

Elverskog does not deny that the Qing used force and economic power to subdue the Mongols, but he persuasively argues that this cannot be the whole story. First of all, the conventional wisdom denies the Mongols any agency, making them only passive victims of an insidious Qing strategy. Second, it regards "Buddhism" as a single monolithic unity, ignoring the transformations of Buddhist religious ideas and practice during these centuries, and the variant meanings given to Buddhist institutions by Mongols, Tibetans, and Manchus. By carefully examining Mongolian texts expressing native Mongolian ideas in a Buddhist idiom, Elverskog sensitively examines the multiple meanings, or "polyvalency," of Mongolian Buddhism in the early modern period. He also draws on interesting comparative insights, such as the localization of Christianity and the "ornamentalism" of British imperial practice in India, to place Mongolia in a larger framework.

Scholars of empire have long wrestled with the problem of discovering "the natives' point of view." Since the ruling elites at the center have produced the vast majority of historical sources, historians perforce must see imperial rule mainly through the eyes of the metropolitan elites. Some empires, whose indigenous populations were nonliterate, have no other written evidence. In cases such as sub-Saharan Africa, historians must rely on ingenious use of oral history and fragmentary archaeological remains. For Russia, the primary source on native peoples comes from late ethnographic investigation. In the New World, except for some native Mayan codices, little written evidence survives from the native population. Yet in Eurasia, the major empires generally built their structures on top of populations who already had an elaborate scriptural tradition. The central imperial language unified the vast spaces but did not totally replace local writing. Ottoman Turkish, Persian in Mughal India, Russia and Chaghatai Turkish helped imperial communications, but the local languages—Arabic, Indic, Georgian—and so forth persisted. The Qing Empire was no different, except that two imperial languages persisted in two idioms along with several local ones. Manchu and Chinese served the conquerors, while Mongolian, Turkic languages, and Tibetan remained the sacred languages of the frontier regions. But the Qing Empire in Mongolia is one of the few imperial sites where a people who had formerly ruled vast territories found themselves reduced to merely a region of a new empire. The Mughal rulers of India are a partial parallel. (If the German tribes, for example, had succeeded in unifying Western Europe, Romance language speakers might have found themselves in the same position. Under Charlemagne and his successors, they almost did.) Mongolia offers a striking example of evolution of language and culture from the imperial center to the imperial periphery. Elverskog's analysis of the texts traces this transformation carefully from the age of Chinggis Khan to the early twentieth century.

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