This dissertation investigates China’s relationship with Inner Asia—encompassing Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang—by focusing on information exchange, economic integration, and worldview formation from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in an international context. Supplementing modern and classical Chinese sources with multilingual materials in Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Japanese, and a range of European languages, my research diversifies scholarly understanding of China’s development as a nation by emphasizing the significant roles of Inner Asian peoples in building the Qing empire. I argue that, instead of a marginal hinterland, Inner Asia was the contact zone that brought Eurasian cultures and knowledge systems together. Moreover, this work challenges the binary discourse of metropole/periphery in the history of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization by demonstrating that the integration of knowledge systems in modern Eurasia started from Inner Asia. Engaging with the scholarship of comparative world history, I argue for the Great Convergence, a novel term that signifies the information exchange, economic integration, and knowledge formation that mobile communities and intelligence networks in Inner Asia facilitated between China, South Asia, and Europe. My research features interdisciplinary methods that bridge the gap between international history and world philology, among other disciplines. This dissertation analyzes information and economic networks between China and Inner Asia. More broadly, the present study contributes to the literature on imperialism, transnationalism, mobility, ethnicity, and science/knowledge in global and comparative contexts. To be specific, this dissertation investigates how Inner Asian mobile communities, such as Tibetan monks, Mongolian pilgrims, and Ladakhi caravans facilitated Qing understandings of other Eurasian empires, including Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, Afsharid Iran, and Durrani Afghanistan. Moreover, I argue that Qing information gathering significantly promoted the international integration of information networks and knowledge systems in early modern Eurasia. Finally, this dissertation generalizes historical trends of knowledge exchange to explore the phenomenon of the Qing empire’s knowledge involution caused by political censorship and information non-transparency. Accordingly, this research sheds light on knowledge divergence between China and Europe to answer why the Qing empire did not achieve a modern scientific revolution compared with its European counterparts.

Representing the first comprehensive study of Tibetan medical institutions, this dissertation argues that medicine played a crucial role in the development of Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), while Tibetan Buddhism played a vital role in the governance of the northern and western borderlands of the Qing Empire. During the same period remembered today for the rise of science along mercantile-colonialist sea routes, an inland network of Tibetan Buddhist monastic medical colleges (gso rig or sman pa grwa tshang) proliferated in tandem with the expansion of the Qing Empire over Inner Asia. My study examines these developments from a regional rather than an anachronistic nation-state perspective, historicizing both the "Tibetan" medical system and its community of practitioners within the context of Qing imperial expansion and decline. Combining the approaches of intellectual and institutional history, I argue that the medical colleges of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries bridged the realms of ritual and materiality that we understand as separate today, providing a key site for the display of benevolent governance, and serving as a vital forum for intellectual and material exchange between the Qing court and peoples of the Tibetan Buddhist frontiers. The "monastic guidelines" (bca' yig) of Tibetan medical colleges provide a window into these institutions' ritual and medical curricula, as well as debates over medical orthodoxy that took place within and between them. Historical narratives within monastic guidelines served as frameworks of legitimacy and templates for ritual practice, and the boundaries of medicine as a discipline were negotiated through the selective incorporation of various medical lineages and traditions. I explore the relationship between ritual debates, doctrinal debates, and ideas about how to both encourage and circumscribe experience within the monastic guidelines of medical colleges. One of the major issues at stake was the relationship between innovation and revelation, as physicians could claim a special insight into the experience of their predecessors in a medical lineage. While innovation was necessary for expertise in healing, revelation was potentially dangerous to the state. Such medical debates give us insight into ideas about the relationship between social and epistemic order taught within Tibetan Buddhist institutions as they spread within the Qing Empire. With the advent of new ways of defining territorial and disciplinary boundaries in the early twentieth century, ritual technologies for defining social and epistemic order were replaced by new institutional structures. I consider why the greater circulation of medical knowledge within the Qing Empire was followed by a fragmentation of medical nationalisms. While Han Chinese nationalists embraced the culture of science as a defensive strategy against Western powers and as a political strategy to distance themselves from the Qing formation, Tibetan Buddhists did not seek such a radical break. Similar and connected medical reforms in Lhasa, Eastern Tibet, Mongolia, and Buryatia reveal the continuity of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge networks and early cooperation among their separate nationalist projects. In the broader context of the history of science, the example of Tibetan Buddhist medical institutions points to the centrality of early modern networks of knowledge in determining modern political configurations.

Following several successful military expeditions against the Mongols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Manchu rulers of Qing China (1644-1911) met an unprecedented challenge as they incorporated culturally different subjects into their growing empire. After doubling in territory and tripling in population, how did the multicultural Qing operate? How did the new imperial subjects receive and reinterpret Qing state policies? What have been the ramifications of the eighteenth-century political innovations in modern China? In this dissertation, I address these questions by examining the encounters of the expanding Qing empire with Tibetans and Mongols in Inner Asia. Central to the analysis is Tibetan Buddhism, to which Mongols and Tibetans have adhered for centuries. Recent decades have seen a growing volume of research attending to Tibetan Buddhism within the context of the Qing’s imperial policies, but key questions still remain with regards to the perspective of these Inner Asian communities and the reasons for their participation in the imperial enterprise. The inadequate understanding of the Qing’s interaction with Tibetan Buddhism is predicated upon the assumption that Qing emperors propitiated the belligerent Mongols by patronizing their religion. While this premise acknowledges Tibetan Buddhism’s importance in the Qing’s imperial formation, it simultaneously deprives those practicing the religion of agency. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how the empire was ruled from the viewpoint of the governed. The project draws evidence from Tibetan-language biographies and monastic chronicles, letters in the Mongolian language, as well as local gazetteers, artisanal manuals, and court statutes in Chinese and Manchu, the two official languages in the Qing era. These textual sources are supplemented by Tibetan Buddhist artifacts housed in museums and libraries in North America and Asia. Through an examination of the wide array of source materials, I argue that the Qing imperial rulers capitalized on the religious culture of Inner Asian communities, which in turn gave rise to a transnational religious network that was centered on Tibetan Buddhist epistemology. The religious knowledge system remained strong well past the formative eighteenth century. Its enduring impact on Qing political and social history was felt even as the empire worked towards creating a distinctive cosmopolitan Qing culture. The dissertation consists of four chapters, each of which locates a space within the context of the symbiotic growth of the Qing and the Tibetan Buddhist knowledge network. This dissertation revolves around Tibetan Buddhist scholars, institutions, rituals, and objects, as they traveled from Tibet to Qing China’s capital and eastern Mongolia, and finally entered the literary realm of intellectuals in eighteenth-century China. Chapter One brings into focus Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation—a dynamic practice that redefined the institutional genealogy of individual prestige—as the Qing imperial power increased its contact with Inner Asian communities from the 1720s in the strategic border region of Amdo between Tibet and Qing China. I discuss how local hereditary headmen refashioned themselves into religious leaders whose enduring influence could transcend even death so as to preserve their prestige. Yet, their impact reached beyond the imperial margin. Chapter Two traces the role of these religious leaders in transforming an imperial private space into the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Qing’s imperial capital. This monastery—Beijing’s Lama Temple (Yonghegong 雍和宮)—not only became a site that manifested Qing imperial devotion to Tibetan Buddhism, but also served as an institutional outpost for the increasingly transnational Tibetan Buddhist network to the east. The Lama Temple was not the only outpost of the growing religious network, and Chapter Three explores another major nodal point within this network at a contact zone in southern Mongolia. It was here that two massive Tibetan Buddhist monasteries were constructed, owing to the mutual efforts undertaken by the imperial household and Tibetan Buddhists from Inner Asia. The final chapter returns to the imperial center but shifts its focus to a discursive space formed by Tibetan Buddhist laity who also occupied official posts in the imperial court. Two Manchu princes and one Mongolian Buddhist composed or were commissioned to compile texts in multiple languages on Tibetan Buddhist epistemology. Their writings reveal the fluidity and extent of the religious network, as well as its symbiotic growth with the imperial enterprise as the Qing empire took shape territorially and culturally. This dissertation concludes by addressing the nature of the Qing’s governance and that of the transnational power of the Tibetan Buddhist network, and it aims to deconstruct the dominant discourse associated with imperial policies in the Inner Asian frontier. My findings offer insight into how Tibetan Buddhism had a lasting impact on the Qing’s imperial imagination, during and after the formative eighteenth century.

This dissertation focuses on fiction and pictorials (huabao, 畫報) in the early twentieth century and its relation with the new visual technologies of the time, mainly photolithography, but also lantern slides and photography. It explores how these visual mediums were self-reflected in fiction and pictorials and how they connected these two literary expressions, as well as their constant transformation. It concludes that this type of intermediality and self-reflexivity came as a response to China’s modernization during the late Qing Empire (1868-1911). Most scholars agreed that photolithography was the catalyst for reproducing visual images in large quantities, which facilitated the hybrid publishing space of pictorials and, in tandem with the other visual mediums, allowed them to act as a multimedia platform. My dissertation demonstrates how fiction also participated in this new visual media ecology created by photolithography and thus contributes to the exploration of an aesthetic, social, and political moment in the late Qing Empire. Major texts discussed in this dissertation include Sequel to Dreams of Shanghai Splendor 續海上繁華夢, The Flower of the Sea of Sin 孽海花, The Tales of the Moon Colony 月球殖民地小說, and The Current News Pictorial 時事畫報, as well as other critical works that also reflect modernization, propaganda, anti-imperialism, and cosmopolitanism. It is widely assumed that this intermedial experimentation was introduced to China with the global trend of modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. However, my dissertation demonstrates an earlier experiment in the 1900s in the literati’s first attempt to directly respond to modern visual and printing technologies. I argue this early experiment should be understood as one of the last attempts to revitalize the traditional Chinese chapter novels (Zhanghuixiaoshuo, 章回小說) during a time when they were gradually being displaced by Westernized modern fiction. I further demonstrate that by depicting the material production of the pictorials, the artists made them not merely a static medium that captured the development of the cities, but rather a transformative medium that developed alongside these cities. My approach will challenge the current methodology that views pictorials as the transparent publishing medium that passively recorded the sociopolitical changes, thus redefining the dynamics of the pictorial images, its production and modernization. These discoveries and analyses will illuminate the transformations of both Chinese pictorials and fiction, and the brave experimental spirit of their writers and artists during the technological transition at the turn of the twentieth century.

The first half of the 18th century saw the advent of Qing imperial authority over Central Tibet and much of Inner Asia. Histories of this formative period have often reiterated narratives of empire building that emanate from the imperial center in Beijing. The few treatments of Qing empire building that engage Tibetan language sources have typically centered around the ties of patronage between the Qing court and Gelukpa monastic hierarchs such as the Dalai Lama and their associated monastic institutions. This dissertation traces elite responses to the political transformations that swept across Central Tibet during the 18th century by examining the literary narratives of the Qing encounter and Tibetan lay rule produced by Tibetan laymen that clustered around the lodestar of the court of the king Polhané Sonam Topgye (r. 1728–1747). How did these courtly elites negotiate the violent and transformative history of state and empire building in 18th century Tibet and Inner Asia? What imaginaries did they draw upon to understand the formation of new political affiliations and communities against the backdrop of Qing imperial expansion? And what was the legacy of the Polha kingdom as lay rule ended in 1750? This dissertation recovers an early modern reading of this lay literary tradition as a distinct form of elite self-fashioning and historiographical practice that emanated from poet-statesmen at the Polha court during the formative decades of Qing rule in Lhasa. In doing so, I foreground the role of a network Tibetan lay elites in the early Central Tibetan encounter with Qing imperial power, and the potency of the Tibetan literary tradition to capture the major political, social, and cultural shifts that Qing imperial rule brought about. Attending to these Tibetan noblemen as both key political actors in and poet-historians of this imperial encounter, I demonstrate how their poetic literary productions sought to reconcile notions of kingship, ethical governance and the history of imperial rule in Tibet and Inner Asia by drawing on an entangled Buddhist political and literary imagination. At its core, this study contributes to the understanding of indirect rule in a multi-ethnic imperium, how Buddhist knowledge making practices responded to imperial conditions, and the connected histories of political formations in early modern Asia. Delinking from the colonial episteme - with its inherent conceptions of the historical and the literature as separate domains, this study reads 18th elite Tibetan sources for both their historical and literary value in tow with Tibetan, Qing, and European archival sources of the period, to offer a window into how Tibetan courtly elites were influenced by, responded to, and imagined the formative encounter between the 18th century Central Tibet and the Qing empire. To this end, this dissertation is comprised of five thematic chapters centering Tibetan lay elites, their encounter with Qing imperial power, their participation in Buddhist elite literary culture, and the broader ethical, material, and political concerns they inscribed through their cultural productions spanning the 18th and early 19th century.

Previous historiography on late Qing naval technology has been geared toward locating the root causes of the Qing’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Pushing back against this teleological view of late Qing naval development, this dissertation underscores the global, multidirectional, and highly contingent processes undergirding the Qing’s naval rebuilding project in the late nineteenth century. Starting from the 1860s, the Qing empire strove to reassert itself as a competitive naval power by establishing new dockyards and arsenals; procuring arms, warships, and machineries from abroad; as well as dispatching educational missions to European naval schools, technical institutes, factories, and shipyards. The Chinese diplomats and students that the Qing sent overseas served as transnational agents who cultivated close-knit networks with Western diplomats, merchants, shipbuilders, military officers, and arms manufacturers. These networks formed the basis upon which the Qing navigated a global marketplace of warships and armaments spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Tracing the personal, material, and institutional networks connecting late Qing China to the world’s naval technology reveals how the Qing engaged actively in a global regime of arms production and arms trading. This regime, driven by the transnational sourcing of raw materials and the export-oriented tendencies of Western arms manufacturers, gave rise to a shared, decentralized, and surprisingly open terrain of material circulation and technological transmission. It produced highly fluid circuits of military industrial products and knowledge that blurred the boundaries between the arms race and the arms trade, secrecy and openness, competition and collaboration. This dissertation shows how the Qing tapped into these tensions through intertwining networks of trade and diplomacy. It also shows how the material and logistical processes underlying the importation of warships, machineries, and shipbuilding components constituted crucial channels for the transfer of naval engineering knowledge from the West to China.

This dissertation offers an in-depth analysis of Tibetan military history, examining the development of military institutions and practices from the Tibetan Imperial period in the 7th century to the Ganden Podrang period in the 17th and 18th centuries. Drawing on a wealth of multilingual sources and employing both quantitative and qualitative research methods, the study investigates the formation of a professional Tibetan army during the period of the Ganden Podrang (1642–1959), the Buddhist government of the Dalai Lamas. This dissertation argues that establishing the Tibetan army necessitated administrative organization and fiscal reform that led to the rise of a modern state. These institutional and military reforms initiated by the Fifth Dalai Lama during the 17th century catalyzed a series of socioeconomic and religious changes that influenced modern state-building and bureaucratization of Tibet and the Chinese Qing Empire (1644–1911). The research highlights the often-overlooked state-building projects of the Fifth Dalai Lama and the Gelukpa, focusing on the military institutions and logistics of the Ganden Podrang. It also investigates the successful integration of Bhutan into Tibet’s tributary system by the civil king Polhané and the reforms in the Tibetan military system following the Gurkha War (1788–1793) and the increasing interactions between the Qing troops and the Tibetan army. Furthermore, the dissertation explores the potential of Big Data to revolutionize historical research in the context of Tibetan military history. This comprehensive examination of Tibetan military history aims to provide a deeper understanding of historical events and processes. The findings of this dissertation offer valuable insights into the development and transformation of Tibetan military institutions, governance, and borderlands interactions, as well as the potential applications of Big Data in Tibetan history.