Modern Tibet

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Monastic Institutions and Social Networks in Late Imperial China and Inner Asia

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Speaker: Stacey Van Vleet (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley)
Topic: Monastic Medical Colleges in the Qing Administration of Inner Asia
Abstract: During the 18th century, as the Qing Empire expanded into Inner Asia through both alliance and war, a network of medical colleges (Tib. sman pa grwa tshang) emerged within Tibetan Buddhist monasteries across the region. Monastic medical colleges, deeply intertwined with claims of legitimate and benevolent rule, were often established through a combination of local initiative and imperial support. How might we characterize the place of these institutions within evolving structures of Qing imperial administration in Inner Asia? This talk will discuss patronage at monastic medical colleges by hereditary nobles and court-appointed banner officials in order to consider this question from imperial, regional, and local perspectives.

Speaker: Brenton Sullivan (Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Colgate University)
Topic: The Social Networks of Thu’u bkwan III (1737-1802) and Gung thang (1762-1823)
Abstract: Two Buddhist luminaries from eighteenth-century Amdo each composed hundreds of unique texts, comprising over 4,000 folios. What can we learn about their respective social networks by cataloging the contextual data found in the colophons of these texts? Thu’u bkwan III Blo bzang chos kyi nyi ma (1737-1802) and Gung thang Dkon mchog bstan pa’i nyi ma (1762-1823) hailed from two of the most influential monasteries in Amdo. They knew each other well. Gung thang even wrote the five hundred-folio biography of Thu’u bkwan. Clearly their social worlds overlapped, but where and to what extent? By systematically cataloging their interactions with others across Buddhist Asia, concrete and textured maps of relationships and dependency begin to appear. Read in conjunction with other historical sources we can begin to draw conclusions about the priorities of Buddhist lamas from Amdo at this time.

Moderator: Gray Tuttle (Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Columbia University)

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World: Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and the Modern Tibetan Studies Program.

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The Qing, Zunghar, Kazakh, and Özbek in Eighteenth-Century Central Eurasia: A Connected History

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Speaker: Hosung Shim (Visiting Scholar, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge)

Moderator: Ling-Wei Kung (Ph.D. in History-East Asia, Columbia University)

In the 1720s, Islamic Central Asia witnessed a series of severe political, military, and social crises. In Transoxiana, the Khanate of Bukhara was devastated by the Kazakhs, who then found refuge in the region following the famous Barefooted Flight. At that time, the Kazakhs desperately fled to the west due to the crushing raids by the Zunghars. Thus, the decline of the Janid Özbek state, the Barefooted Flight of the Kazakhs, and the westward expansion of the Zunghar empire were all closely related. Yet, a crucial question remains unanswered. Why did the Zunghars march west and deal a fatal blow to the Kazakhs in the early 1720s? In this talk, I demonstrate that the Zunghar military venture had much to do with the Zunghar empire’s strategy to guarantee its survival over the course of the prolonged military rivalry with the Qing empire. By focusing on the Qing–Zunghar military conflict and Zunghar’s response to it, I aim to reveal that the Qing empire’s military activity in the eastern part of the Central Asian steppe exerted significant––albeit unwitting––influence on the history of Islamic Central Asia in the early eighteenth century.

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World: Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and the Modern Tibetan Studies Program.

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Understanding Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau: Climate Data and Community Knowledge

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The Tibetan Plateau spans more than one million square miles at the center of Eurasia with an average elevation of over 12,000 feet – by far the most extensive high-altitude region on Earth. Resulting from the collision of continental plates more than 50 million years ago, the Tibetan Plateau continues to play a major role in determining the climate that we experience today. More recently, the Tibetan Plateau has seen more significant warming than surrounding regions due to its higher altitude. As such, Tibetan communities are at the forefront of experiencing the impacts of climate change and their knowledge of such changes may contribute to better understanding the effects of a changing climate on this most significant region.

This round table brings together social science researchers working with Tibetan pastoralist communities on the Tibetan Plateau and climate scientists who have worked in the Himalayas and Asia to discuss how interdisciplinary approaches might enrich understandings of climate change on the Tibetan Plateau and contribute to our knowledge of global climate change.

Speakers:

Emily Yeh is a professor in the Geography Department at the University of Colorado Boulder and currently president-elect of the American Association of Geographers. She conducts research on development and nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including the political ecology of pastoralism, the intersection of the political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization, the relationship between ideologies of nature and nation, and the conjunctural production of environmental subjectivities. She has also conducted interdisciplinary, collaborative research on vulnerability to and indigenous knowledge of climate change amongst pastoralists in Tibet.

Huatse Gyal is an environmental anthropologist at the University of Michigan. His research explores Tibetan pastoralists’ ways of theorizing and relating to their ancestral land. His publications include a co-edited volume in Nomadic Peoples on mass relocation of Tibetan nomads, a peer-reviewed article in Critical Asian Studies, as well as a number of widely-read online academic essays advocating for the interdependent relationship between land, language, and the well-being of people and community in Tibetan and English.

Kelly Hopping is an assistant professor in Human-Environment Systems at Boise State University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how global change is affecting ecosystems and livelihoods, particularly in pastoral/rangeland systems. Her work in Tibet has focused on the impacts of climate change from Western scientific and local perspectives, the role of livestock grazing in alpine meadows, and the sustainability of harvesting an economically valuable medicinal fungus (yartsa gunbu) across the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayan region.

Hung Nguyen is a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He uses tree rings to infer changes in the water cycle in the distant past, and apply that knowledge to water resources management. He has reconstructed centuries of discharge history for many rivers in Asia.

Boniface Fosu is a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. One aspect of his research is understanding and modeling the interactions between weather and climate, emphasizing the linkages between extreme weather and human-induced climate change without undermining the role of naturally driven climate variability. Some of his research contributions border on Asia’s susceptibility to the impacts of weather and climate extremes, including Tibet.

Brendan Buckley holds the position of Lamont Research Professor, and has been a long-time member of the Tree Ring Lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (LDEO). While he has worked in locations around the globe, Buckley has been one of the pioneers of tropical dendroclimatology, having produced the longest and best replicated records of absolutely dated tree ring sequences from Southeast Asia. Among his most important discoveries were the identification of two key periods of drought that coincided with the two most tumultuous periods of the past millennium over Southeast Asia – the Angkor droughts of the late 14th/early 15th century, and the Strange Parallels Drought of late 18th century, respectively. He continues this important work by using new methods to develop discrete seasonal reconstructions of regional hydroclimate, including measures of the strength of summer and winter monsoons, as well as the “shoulder” seasons that lead into and out of them, over the past millennium. Buckley is a proponent of interdisciplinary research, working with historians, archaeologists, geochemists and atmospheric scientists.

Eveline Washul is Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Adjunct Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and Tibetan Studies from Indiana University in 2018. Her research methods combine ethnography with Tibetan historical sources from the 12th to 20th centuries. Her research studies how the particularities of Tibetan relationships to places shape their transition from rural to urban livelihoods in the late-socialist reform period in the People’s Republic of China.

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