Empire and Ethnicity: Qing Legacies in China and Inner Asia, 1600 to Today

3 units

Eschewing traditional narratives of a closed Chinese civilization, this course explores the cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity of China and its dynamic interactions with Inner Asia during the early modern period. It questions the myth of a monolithic Chinese culture and uncovers the region's multiple and ethnically entangled past through an in-depth look at the Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1644-1912). This was the last non-Han dynasty of the Imperial Era, and it gave the People's Republic of China its vast Inner Asian territories: Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. In rethinking the Qing Empire, this course particularly focuses on Tibetan Buddhism and Islam as religious ideologies that linked China with Tibetan, Mongolian, and Turkic-Muslim regions of Inner Asia through the imperial center at Beijing. Specific topics will range from food culture (Halal) to the Qing's expansion into and later colonization of Xinjiang, the reverberations of which persist even today under the Belt and Road Initiative.