Global Oriental - Japan and East Asia Books

This special edition of Inner Asia brings together a range of recent scholarship on what can be defined as the Tibet-Mongolia interface - the ensemble of political, cultural, geographical and even kinship relations between Mongols and Tibetans. It is not, however, simply a binary relationship: sometimes as two distinct entities, sometimes merging into a tangle of religious and political relations, Mongols and Tibetans have always found themselves in a triangular relationship with their powerful neighbour and sometime overlord, China. Expressions such as the Tibetan phrase 'Rgya Bod Hor' (China, Tibet and Mongolia), used by Yeshe Paljor and many others, reflect this set of relations in which each entity is linked to yet distinct from the other. An eighteenth-century Tibetan text even described the Fifth Dalai Lama as having 'covered with his umbrella of religious and political rule the three, China, Mongolia and Tibet'. However, from the point of view of the other parties involved, the Dalai Lama's religious authority would not have been understood so simply as equivalent to political control over the area. We often encounter particularities of this kind in historical sources, and through them we can perceive how the co-existence of contradictory perspectives seems to have been an essential part of the system itself.

The seven papers in this volume highlight some of the most intriguing and controversial issues that arise in the study of this area of extreme ethnic and political complexity.

Uyunbilig Borjigidai, a historian from Inner Mongolia, outlines the character and history of the Hoshuud polity in the period from 1637 to 1723, from the arrival of the Hoshuud Mongols into the Kökhnuur region to the demise of their rule at the time of their full integration in the Qing empire. This paper highlights, from a Mongolian point of view, the political setting of an area and a period which proved to be crucial for the modern definition of Mongolian and Tibetan ethnic identities. This significance, underlined by Bulag (Bulag 2002), has often been underestimated in historical debates which tended to privilege the point of view of Chinese and/or Tibetan sources.

Hildegard Diemberger and Yangdon Dhondup, respectively a social anthropologist and a Tibetan specialist in modern Tibetan literature written in Chinese, explore a more recent history, that of one of the various Mongolian enclaves that claim descent from the Hoshuud rulers of the Kökhnuur. In particular this paper focuses on the life of Tashi Tsering, the last Mongolian queen of Henan (Tib.: Malho or Sogpo) who had to negotiate, both as a ruler and as a woman, the transition of her community from nomad principality to Mongolian autonomous county of the People's Republic of China.

Nasan Bayar, an anthropologist from Inner Mongolia, engages with the local history of another group of contemporary Hoshuud Mongols, the people of Alasha in western Inner Mongolia, who also claim Güüshi Khan as their ancestor. The paper focuses on the twentieth-century history of this area and on the last Hoshuud prince who struggled his way through various pro-independence movements, the Republican government, the Japanese invasion and eventually the communist regime. The paper discusses also the production of local historical narratives in the framework of history writing in China - history in the sense that Duara has described - with particular attention on the production of historical film.

The description of the reincarnation line of the Desi Sangye Gyatso, Tibet's regent at the end of the seventeenth century, and of the 'secret history' of the Sixth Dalai Lama has been written by a scholar who is a Professor of Linguistics at Inner Mongolia University and who is also recognised in Alasha as the sixth reincarnation of Sangye Gyatso. This paper represents therefore a unique contribution to the debate over the fate of the Sixth Dalai Lama, who is either considered according to official histories of the time to have died in 1706 in the Kökhnuur area or, according to the so-called 'secret' history written by the first in the line of reincarnations of Sangye Gyatso in Alasha, to have escaped and to have spread Buddhism in Alasha, where he died in 1746. There his disciples founded a monastery and a system of reincarnations that has continued up to the present day. Michael Aris, in his detailed study of the matter, focused on the paradox between the claim that the Sixth Dalai Lama died in 1746 in Alasha and the fact that the boy recognised throughout Tibet as the Seventh Dalai Lama had been born in 1708. It seems, however, that historians feel less at ease with this kind of contradiction than do Tibetans and Mongols. In any case, whether the 6th Dalai Lama was or was not an 'impersonator', as Aris claimed, there was definitely a body in the stupa that was destroyed in 1966 by the Red Guards at the monastery of Baruun Heid in Alasha, the same one that Kozlov had described in his account of his travels to that area in 1906. Jalsan's account offers a first-hand contribution to the history of this issue which is also a view from 'inside' into the living tradition and its roots.

Elke Studer, a social anthropologist, provides an ethnography of horse-races in Nagchu, as they have been recently reinvented by the administration of the Tibet Autononomous Region. This reconstruction of tradition was based on ancient Tibetan territorial cults that had been appropriated and reshaped by the Hoshuud Mongols in the seventeenth century. These festivals, which are quite close to the Mongolian naadam, had been introduced in various areas of Tibet, from Nagchu to Ngari, at the time of Guushi Khan and of the Mongolian general Ganden Tsewang, and are still celebrated in their name.

Yangdon Dhondup's paper on Mongolian-Tibetan authors from Sogpo (Ch. Henan) outlines two of the most prominent figures in modern Tibetan literature, both of whom happen to be Mongols. Through their history, their works and their decision to write in Tibetan she explores the question of a local sub-national literature and also some of the issues of ethnicity that arise in an enclave in which Mongolian, Tibetan and Chinese identies merge. To some extent Jangbu and Tsering Dondrup seem to embody the legacy of great scholars of earlier times, such as Sumpa Khenpo, by crossing and challenging political and cultural boundaries.

Robert Barnett's extended study of cinema, ethnicity and seventeenth-century Tibetan-Mongolian relations discusses the case of a famous historical film that was produced in Tibet at the end of the 1980s only to be banned immediately after its completion. The author, a specialist in modern Tibetan studies with long experience in film and theatre, provides a sharp analysis of film-making in relation to historical narratives and to issues of ethnicity. He develops the argument in the framework of a broader discussion about propaganda and popular practices of 'reading in reverse' in late socialist regimes. With this essay he offers also the first overview so far to appear in a western language of Tibetan film and of questions of censorship in relation to Tibet's modern history.

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