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xi Preface his book is an attempt to portray a world made alien partly by distance, but mostly by history. It is primarily about choices: choices of allegiance, choices of identity, choices of interpretation , the choices people make to negotiate turbulent times. It attempts to de¤ne the parameters within which a particular set of people made particular choices, and to investigate what in¶uences those choices, in turn, had on the evolution of the parameters within which the next choices would be made. And it traces changing interpretations of these choices in the sources, primarily as a method for extracting hints about tenth-century circumstances from materials mostly written centuries after the events. Presented here are the results of research that started out very differently . My original doctoral topic of frontier crossers developed into a thesis about the creation of what I would now call a border, which then necessitated a rethinking of several important assumptions before it could take the present form. In the course of (seemingly endless) rewriting, my new assumptions , unavoidably, had to be woven back into every part of the book. Accordingly , the ¤nished work starts at the end of my own process, and as such is not an explanation of how I got there, but an invitation to make the journey again wearing a different set of spectacles, speaking a different language, and attuned for a different set of observations. A journey was also what sparked my fascination with frontiers. In the early 1980s, cycling through an Eastern Europe still under the shadow of the Cold War, I observed at close quarters the multitudinous and paradoxical workings of frontiers and borders. I noticed that the Berlin Wall was to keep the East Germans in, and that the ¤ercest barriers were at the AustriaHungary border, crossed freely in both directions every day. On country roads, borders were marked by simple checkpoints with not a fence in sight, and dramatic changes in the landscape were better signs of entering a new country, as when the small ¤elds and hay stooks of Czechoslovakia gave way to Hungarian ¤elds so big the roads ran through and not around them. Meanwhile, in xii Preface Poland, the bright, new copper roofs of the churches declared the population ’s allegiance to Catholicism above all. That trip introduced me to the practical concerns of living the frontier: how is it de¤ned, deployed, subverted , or ignored by the local inhabitants? What role, if any, do central governments play in this relationship? Why is frontier crossing, in its various forms, such an arena for struggle between governments and locals? In the ¤eld of Chinese history questions like these are now allowing us to make some inroads into fresh understandings of frontier issues. In the too many years since I started this research, the concept of sinicization has gone from bugbear to nonissue, from the knife in the table represented by Pamela Crossley’s 1990 essay “Thinking about Ethnicity in Early Modern China,” to Sudipta Sen’s announcement of the death of the assimilationist model in the Journal of Asian Studies in 2002. In that time ethnicity has become the chief route out of the discourse of sinicization, but now ethnicity itself is in question as a framework—at least for the premodern period—and here I try to offer alternative categories of analysis, better suited to a world where ethnicity was not conceivable as a way of organizing the world. There are, of course, too many debts to mention, so only a few can feature here. Jinty Nelson taught me how fascinating chronicles are, and how to read them. Anne Duggan did her best to make my prose bearable. Herbert Franke was deeply encouraging about Classical Chinese. Like many others, I bene¤ted from the patient and persistent support of Denis Twitchett. His generous encouragement will be greatly missed. Pamela Crossley has been by turns inspiration, supporter, essential critic, and conscience . My colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Superior and at Newcastle have provided warm and supportive working environments, complete with interested students. The original research for this book was completed with the assistance of a predoctoral fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange in Taiwan. Subsequent jobs, fellowships, and conference invitations have mostly been taken as opportunities to explore other angles and related topics rather than working on this manuscript, from which delaying tactics I can only hope it has bene¤ted, however belatedly. Thanks here go...

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