The Making of the Shatuo: Military Leadership and Border Unrest in North China's Daibei (808–880)
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: The articles gathered in this issue of Central Asiatic Journal take innovative approaches, utilising material old and new, in the study of central Asia.Each contribution is based on the scrupulous philological study of texts ranging from manuscripts and rare editions to transmitted sources in a variety of languages, as well as artistic and material evidence.Beyond that, each essay engages in serious interdisciplinary consideration of the cultural, ethnic, linguistic, religious and political forces at work.The authors practise historical writing at its best, combining close readings of individual documents and unique objects with sophisticated reflection on how small pieces of evidence relate to -and significantly alter -the received understanding of broader patterns.This issue of the journal also demonstrates how, in the premodern period, the now-popular rubric of Silk Road Studies covered a much broader range of time and space than usually assumed.Popova provides meticulous, copiously annotated translations of important sections of the two most important primary sources for the study of Chinese administration of the Western Regions during the Former Han dynasty, the Records of the Historian (Shiji 史記, completed in 87 BCE) and the History of the Former Han (Qian Hanshu 前漢書, completed in 76 CE).She combines these with her own astute analysis of toponyms, office names, administrative and military organisations, and other terminology.She also draws on the still underappreciated scholarship of one of the first Russian sinologists, Nikita Bichurin (1777-1853).While focused on the early period, the article also broaches important subjects that were salient through the following two millennia, including the limits of Chinese control over Xinjiang and other parcels included in the shifting concept of the "Western Regions" and the policies adopted by successive Chinese states toward relations with foreign states.Ogihara offers what he modestly titles a "Miscellany on the Tumshuqese Documents", but, in fact, through the linguistic methods used and the corpus of materials consulted, the article delivers much more.It summarises significant advances in our
Source: Central Asiatic Journal
Author: Barenghi
Language: English
Topic: Eurasian Exchange Networks
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3168323714