Overlapping Empires: Religion, Politics, and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Qinghai*

In the early 1820s, two men possessed of substantial administrative experience produced treatises on the governance of Kökenuur (Ma. Kūke noor, Ch. Qinghai), a strategic yet troubled region at the crossroads of China, Tibet, and Mongolia.¹ The first author was the Geluk hierarch and reborn lama Belmang Pandita Könchok Gyeltsen (Dbal mang 02 Dkon mchog rgyal mtshan, 1764–1863), who served as the twenty–fourth abbot of Labrang monastery from 1804–09. Between 1819 and 1821, Belmang Pandita completed The Ladder for Guiding the Youth, Lessons Summarizing the History of India, Tibet, Eastern and Western Mongolia (hereinafter “History”), a kind of “mirror for princes” addressed simultaneously to the lay Mongol nobility of Kökenuur and the rulers of monastic domains.² The second author was the Qing official Nayanceng (1764–1833). A perfect contemporary of Belmang Pandita and the scion of a Manchu lineage with a long history of service in the empire’s borderlands—his grandfather Agūi (1717–97) had overseen the conquest of Xinjiang—Nayanceng assumed high office in Gansu province on four different occasions: three times as the governor-general of Shaanxi and Gansu (1804, 1810–13, and 1822–25) and once as the Xining amban (the emperor’s superintendent of Mongol and Tibetan affairs in Xining, also known as the “Qinghai amban”; 1807–08). In 1825, following his third tenure as governor-general, Nayanceng approved the publication and distribution of his collected memorials concerning the affairs of Kökenuur under the title Memorials Concerning the Pacification of the Fan (Pingfan zouyi, hereinafter “Memorials”).³

While there is no evidence that Nayanceng and Belmang Pandita ever met in person, they must have known of each other. Among other things, Belmang’s tenure as the abbot of the largest monastery in the Gansu-Kökenuur region overlapped with Nayanceng’s second tour of duty in the region, as the Xining amban from 1807–08. It is a matter of course that they would have communicated during this period.⁴ Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, Nayanceng and Belmang shared a common concern: the increasingly violent repercussions of the collapse of the governing authority of the Mongol princely domains of Kökenuur (also known as the Deedü or “Upper” Mongols). The survival of the Mongol aristocracy of Kökenuur had not always been a major concern of either Geluk hierarchs or Qing authorities. On the contrary, up until the early 1800s, they had tried to curb Mongol power. Ever since the Khoshud branch of the Oirat Mongols, under the leadership of Güüshi Khan and with the assistance of their Junghar confederates, had conquered Kökenuur, Kham, and central Tibet in the 1640s, the Geluk and Qing administrators alike had attempted to manage or otherwise suppress the princely domains of Güüshi’s descendants. By the early 1800s, however, the wealth and military prowess of the Khoshud was discussed only in the past tense. Mongol aristocrats complained that ceaseless raiding by outsiders—“tribal Fandze” (aiman i fandze) or “raw Fan” (eshun fandze) in Manchu sources,⁵ “wild Fan” (yefan) or “raw Fan” (shengfan) in Chinese sources, or “nomads” (’brog pa), in Tibetan sources—had made life unbearable in their domains. Lacking the wealth and military forces to patrol their pastures, their subjects were deserting—even joining the raiders in some cases—and the princes were contemplating fleeing en masse from Kökenuur to take refuge within the borders of Gansu province. In several banners, the population had declined by over a half from 1810 to 1823, and Qing preflectures as far away as Liangzhou and Ganzhou (present-day Wuwei and Zhangye, respectively) along the Hexi Corridor were inundated with destitute refugees.⁶

Both the Qing and the Geluk found much to worry about in the unsettled political landscape of Kökenuur. However, Belmang and Nayanceng presented very different diagnoses of the crisis and offered profoundly different prescriptions for the future health of the region. Reading their texts together reveals how a segment of the Qing official class and some Tibetan Buddhist elites arrived at a major reconsideration of...