Johan Elverskog received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. His research focuses on the history of Buddhism in Inner Asia, Mongol intellectual history and the cultural history of the Qing dynasty. Among his publications are Uygur Buddhist Literature (1997), The Jewel Translucent Sutra: Altan Khan and the Mongols in the Sixteenth Century (2003), The Pearl Rosary (2006) and numerous journal articles and essays in edited volumes. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University.
Although it is generally believed that the Manchus controlled the Mongols through their patronage of Tibetan Buddhism, scant attention has been paid to the Mongol view of the Qing imperial project. In contrast to other accounts of Manchu rule, Our Great Qing focuses not only on what images the metropole wished to project into Mongolia, but also on what images the Mongols acknowledged themselves. Rather than accepting the Manchu’s use of Buddhism, Johan Elverskog begins by questioning the static, unhistorical, and hegemonic view of political life implicit in the Buddhist explanation. By stressing instead the fluidity of identity and Buddhist practice as processes continually developing in relation to state formations, this work explores how Qing policies were understood by Mongols and how they came to see themselves as Qing subjects. In his investigation of Mongol society on the eve of the Manchu conquest, Elverskog reveals the distinctive political theory of decentralization that fostered the civil war among the Mongols. He explains how it was that the Manchu Great Enterprise was not to win over "Mongolia" but was instead to create a unified Mongol community of which the disparate preexisting communities would merely be component parts. A key element fostering this change was the Qing court’s promotion of Gelukpa orthodoxy, which not only transformed Mongol historical narratives and rituals but also displaced the earlier vernacular Mongolian Buddhism. Finally, Elverskog demonstrates how this eighteenth-century conception of a Mongol community, ruled by an aristocracy and nourished by a Buddhist emperor, gave way to a pan-Qing solidarity of all Buddhist peoples against Muslims and Christians and to local identities that united for the first time aristocrats with commoners in a new Mongol Buddhist identity on the eve of the twentieth century.
目次
Acknowledgments xi Note on Transcription xiii Mongol Reign Periods xv Qing Reign Periods xvii Introduction 1 1. The Mongols on the Eve of Conquest 14 2. The Mongols and Political Authority 40 3. Qing Ornamentalism and the Cult of Chinggis Khan 63 4. The Poetics, Rituals and Language of Being Mongol, Buddhist and Qing 90 5. The Buddhist Qing and Mongol Localization in the Nineteenth Century 127 Epilogue 166 Notes 171 List of Tibetan Spellings 207 Chinese Character Glossary 209 References 211 Index 235
