PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Lan Wu is assistant professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.
Common Ground delivers fresh perspectives on the formation of the Qing Empire from the vantage of its swelling Inner Asian frontier. Admirably, Lan Wu decenters court narratives in favor of negotiated platforms through which Tibetans, Mongols, Manchus, and Chinese actors made (and unmade) visions of sovereignty, territoriality, and belonging. -- Matthew King, author of <i>Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire</i> Common Ground brilliantly explores the entangled history of the Qing imperial enterprise and the Gelukpa expansion in East Asia, which produced a shared communal Buddhist identity. Wu explores the transregional knowledge network woven by Buddhist intellectuals through monasteries, texts, and images. She sheds light on the understudied peripheral regions of Amdo and Inner Mongolia and in cosmopolitan Beijing. -- Isabelle Charleux, author of <i>Nomads on Pilgrimage. Mongols on Wutaishan (China), 1800-1940</i> Common Ground is a significant addition to the study of late imperial China and Inner Asia. Reconfiguring the terms of the imperial encounter between Qing rulers and Tibetan lamas, it provides a critical contribution to discussions and interpretations of Buddhism as a rhetorical, intellectual, and political space. -- Nicola Di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study
