Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [340]-358).

A more descriptive title for the dissertation might be "Early historiography in Purang-Guge and its relationship between orality, kingship, and Tibetan identity: a close study of a recently uncovered 12th century historical manuscript from Tholing monastery in West Tibet." The present study is therefore a close textual analysis of all the outer and inner features of the Tholing Manuscript. When reading the text, there is the gradual realization that the archaic peculiarities in script, binding, spelling, vocabulary, prose, and narrative twists, all highlight the work as a wholly rare and different version from those early histories typically found in Central Tibet. The key difference lies primarily in the focal point of the narrative. Whereas most similar narratives from the time of the phyi dar (11th-13th centuries) onwards place at the core of their structure the history of Buddhism in Tibet, the Tholing text puts as its central focus kingship and the history of kings in Tibet. For this reason, while Buddhism plays an essential and integral part of the story as a whole, the text can be viewed as a more secular work then any comparable monastic history of the period. The narrative structure of the manuscript, with its heavy use of rhythmical prose, similes, archaic topoi and motifs, is hauntingly familiar to those parallel passages found among Old Tibetan Documents and is emblematic of the liminal period in which the text was written. At this time, histories were transitioning from disperse and possibly oral transmissions to predominantly formal organized written traditions. The poetic nature of the text, together with its unusual physical features, raises questions relating to its purpose and function, with the possibility of its use as a ritual manuscript for royal legitimization. Through a close study of the text, I offer some insights on the formative nature of early Tibetan historiography in establishing the sacred and political power of the kings of West Tibet.

This dissertation examines the relationship between human societies and natural landscape in the Songpan region of northern Sichuan, China from 1800 to 2005. It seeks to achieve three goals. First, it seeks to complicate our understanding of China's modern political transformation from dynastic state to republic and socialist state by adding an environmental perspective to these changes. Second, it seeks to complicate existing understanding of China's environmental history, which is largely concerned with developments in "China proper," by focusing on an isolated and historically autonomous locality in western China. Finally, this dissertation seeks to understand the historical processes that led to the region's gradual incorporation into the Chinese state in terms of changing patterns of land use, resource management, and how a variety of local actors interacted with one another to produce these changes. To achieve these goals, the dissertation explores and analyzes the various ways that indigenous communities, largely Tibetan, and successive Chinese states have inhabited the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau and how their socio-economic structures, land use strategies, political ideologies, and technologies combined with environmental factors to shape the world around them. This program of research contributes a local environmental and socio-economic dimension to existing political and religious histories of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. No separate study has analyzed the social, political, economic and environmental encounters in the late imperial, Republican, and modern periods as a whole in western China. In order to analyze the dynamics of local socio-economic and environmental change, this dissertation de-centers China geographically and socially in order to look at an "exceptional typical" periphery. In the process, it challenges common and ideological historical chronologies of social and political development in western China. By analyzing Tibetan-Chinese political, social and market relations, it also adds to the literature of local elite and state patterns of dominance in twentieth century China. Finally, it contributes to a growing literature on Chinese environmental history by analyzing the role of changing systems of resource use and development in western China while revealing the often complex and dialectical ways that human societies and environmental factors have interacted in western China. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

This is a two-pronged study of how the Chinese and Tibetan literary traditions have become intertwined in the modern era. Setting out from the contention that the study of minority literatures in China must be fundamentally multilingual in its approach, this dissertation investigates how Tibetans were written into Chinese literature, and how Tibetans themselves adopted and adapted Chinese literary discourses to their own ends. It begins with Lu Xun and the formative literary conceptions of nation in the late Qing and Republican periods – a time when the Tibetan subject was fundamentally absent from modern Chinese literature – and then moves to the 1980s, when Tibet and Tibetans belatedly, and contentiously, became valid subject matter for Han Chinese writers. The second aspect of the project situates modern Tibetan-language literature, which arose from the 1980s onwards, within the literary and intellectual context of modern China. I read Döndrup Gyel, modern Tibetan literature’s “father figure,” as working within unmistakably Lu Xun-ian paradigms, I consider the contradictions that arose when Tsering Döndrup’s short story “Ralo” was interpreted as a Tibetan equivalent of “The True Story of Ah Q,” and I analyze the rise of a “Tibetan May Fourth Movement” in the 2000s, which I argue presented a selective reading of modern China’s intellectual history. Throughout, I focus on the intersections and divergences at play and examine the ways in which these texts navigate complex and conflicting discourses of nationalism, statism, and colonialism. The conclusions of this research point us toward significant theoretical reconceptualizations of literary practices in the People’s Republic of China, which now include not only a vast body of Chinese-language writing on minority peoples, but also numerous minority-language literatures and distinct “national” literary traditions.

Geological Society of China Cenozoic climatic and environmental changes in the arid Asian interior, and their possible relations with global climatic changes and the Tibetan Plateau uplift, have been intensively investigated and debated over past decades. Here we present 40-Myr (million years)-long n-alkane records from a continuous Cenozoic sediment sequence in the Dahonggou Section, Qaidam Basin, northern Tibetan Plateau, to infer environmental changes in the northern basin. A set of n-alkane indexes, including ACL, CPI and Paq, vary substantially and consistently throughout the records, which are interpreted to reflect relative contributions from terrestrial vascular plants vs. aquatic macrophytes, and thus indicate depositional environments. ACL values vary between 21 and 30; CPI values range from 1.0 to 8.0; and Paq values change from <0.1 to 0.8 over the past 40-Myr. We have roughly identified two periods, at 25.8–21.0 Ma (million years ago) and 13.0–17.5 Ma, with higher ACL and CPI and lower Paq values indicating predominant lacustrine environments. Lower ACL and CPI values, together with higher Paq values, occurred at >25.8 Ma, 17.5–21.0 Ma, and <13.0 Ma, corresponding to alluvial fan/river deltaic deposits and shallow lacustrine settings, consistent with the observed features in sedimentological facies. The inferred Cenozoic environmental changes in the northern Qaidam Basin appear to correspond to global climatic changes.

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As one of the few piano works with Tibetan folk characteristics, the piano suite Tibetan Sketches composed by Bingyuan Cui presents a vivid depiction of the Tibetan people with colorful sound and considerable imagination. As a Tibetan, I have been greatly honored to research and perform this work and incorporate my understanding into this dissertation. The composer took into account Western composition techniques as well as Eastern music, combining religious and folk musical elements of Chinese ethnic minorities with Western piano techniques to create a wonderful work. This dissertation introduces the characteristics of Tibetan music and analyzes the work, then explores the use of Tibetan elements and the varied styles in the three movements of Tibetan Sketches. Cui uses a large number of Tibetan elements in this work, closely related to the local Tibetan music style in melodies, decorations, harmonies, tone color changes, and performance techniques. Based on the historical background and influence of Western music on the development of Chinese music and some other aspects, a brief description is given of the Eastern and Western music styles in the work. This dissertation introduces my own performance and learning experience when I studied this work, communications and an interview with the composer are also taken into account.

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