Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier.

Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier. By C. Patterson Giersch. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 308 pp. $49.95. Cloth.

The scene: an ethnically diverse and moderate-sized crescent-shaped area at the southwest tip of Yunnan province. The Crescent--the Myanmar-Tai-Chinese borderland home of Tai people and Han Chinese for centuries--has rarely come under scrutiny by historians. C. Patterson Giersch's ground-breaking study of the people, politics, and frontiers of this remote region fills this gap. Giersch not only provides an excellent study of Qing frontier politics and cross-border Sino-Southeast Asian relations, but he also places the Tai people and their story at the forefront of his investigation.

The book begins with a concise and thoroughly researched introduction to China's southern frontiers prior to the eighteenth century and a clear methodology to approach the sometimes contentious issue of frontier-borderlands theory. Giersch then divides the book into two major sections. In the first section, he examines the process by which the Crescent was incorporated into the Qing Empire and colonized by Han migrants and military personnel. In addition to analyzing the dynamic interaction of Qing-Tai political and military relations at the regional level, a process characterized by both hostile aggression and cultural accommodation, Giersch also examines the region and its transformation in an interregional and international context by discussing Burmese (Myanmar), Siamese (Thailand), and Chinese state relations at their borders. In the second section, Giersch shifts to the social and cultural changes that accompanied the political and military transformation of the Crescent region. He turns to the local level for a fresh view on cultural interaction in the late imperial period--to the indigenous, merchant, and migrant populations who fashioned a new and ethnically diverse society on China's southwestern borderlands. In addition to his exploration of demographic change and urbanization, Giersch analyzes the importance of commercialization and growth of long-distance trade between China and these borderlands, which has stimulated local and regional markets since the late eighteenth century. He closes with an excellent discussion of how complicated the cultural, social, and political tapestry was in the Crescent by the nineteenth century, a hybrid social and political realm where indigenous groups borrowed as much from southern states as from China.

This book does more than enlighten us about a remote borderland region of southwestern China in the late imperial period. Giersch is very meticulous and balanced in his approach to Qing conquest and incorporation of the region. He carefully describes the accommodations and modifications of policy and practice the Qing state had to make on one of its most remote frontiers, a politically ambiguous and relatively autonomous locale. Local ethnic, cultural, and political circumstances played a role in transforming both policy and policymakers in this region. This challenges some of the more nationalistic interpretations of the region's history. Giersch also offers an interesting and nuanced view of indigenous and state histories of the region. Multiple actors, including Qing officials, Chinese settlers, and Tai aristocrats, played key roles in the social and political transformation of the region. Far from playing passive roles vis-a-vis a monolithic and powerful Qing Empire and Burmese and Siamese officials, local Tai leaders coped with or altered regional policies and practice as they interacted with the Chinese immigrants and military in their region. In the process of finding a sociopolitical "middle ground," both indigenous people and immigrants pursued their own interests on the frontier, sometimes in conflict with the Qing state. Tai and Chinese populations were subject to acculturation in the Crescent, and both sides adopted something from the other.

Two things are less clear in this study of the Crescent. First, it is less clear how this region related to the Yunnan frontier as a whole--it is only one part of the economic, multiethnic, and frontier southwest that included Tibetans, Akha, and Yi, among others, who lived in western and southern Yunnan. Second, while indigenous Tai and Chinese settlers maneuvered through their complex social and political environments relatively successfully in the late imperial period, one wonders about their relationship with the landscape of the Crescent and to what degree ecological processes, isolated river valleys, mountainous terrain, and highland ecosystems affected the social and political fortunes of the diverse and isolated authorities and peoples of the region. This book, however, makes a significant contribution to the surprisingly scanty literature on China's southern borderlands. This rich and provocative study also sets indigenous actors at the "center of the scene" along with Qing officials and Chinese migrants. This will be a welcome study and a must-read for scholars and students of frontier history in general, politics and state formation in East and Southeast Asia, and Qing imperial history.

Jack Patrick Hayes

Department of History

University of British Columbia