China and her Neighbours
The book China and her Neighbours. Borders, Visions of the Other, Foreign Policy. 10th to 19th Century provides the reader with a well-founded and interesting survey on what the Chinese thought of 'foreign' lands, countries, and people during different periods of time, and the practical way in which they dealt with frontier problems or simply with certain 'foreign' persons, be these diplomats, merchants, or just travellers. Every article introduces a different aspect of this general topic.By Angela Schottenhammer
The designation of China as the 'Middle Kingdom' (Zhongguo) is already an indication that, at least in earlier times when this term came into extistence, 'the Chinese' regarded themselves as being located at the centre of the world, a view which was in fact not particularly unfamiliar among people in the Western Christian world. Whether 'China', however, saw itself more as the centre of the universe or as an empire among equals, or whether many of the Chinese people did not really care about such questions, it goes without saying that borders and the existence of rulers beyond Chinese territorry were very real and had to be dealt with.In this context Sabine Dabringhaus and Roderich Ptak introduce eleven interesting case studies on different aspects and time periods from the 10th to the 19th centuries concerning borders, both land and maritime, visions of borders, and concrete interaction in foreign policy. Their leading question was 'the role of borders (boundaries, frontiers, limits) mainly in China's perception and management of other people'. Christian Lamoureux takes the border dispute between the Song and the Liao in 1074/75 as an example to show how differently the borderline was interpreted on both sides, and how the Song government, which eventually appointed Shen Gua, a famous contemporary geographer, as an envoy, found a practical solution to the problem.
In this respect, Lamoureux shows that the negotiations, at least in part, depended on the ability of the Song administration to collect, compare, and analyse historical archival materials from a geographical persepective. Johannes Kurz describes the significance of the Yangzi and the Yangzi region in the territorial disputes over Huainan between the Southern Tang dynasty and its northern neighbours in the mid-10th century, one characteristic of this border being its quality as natural fixed barrier.
Marion Eggert examines different visions of three different quality Korean borders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they are reflected in contemporary Korean travellers' accounts. She provides several text passages to show, depending on their quality and disputablility, how the different borders were perceived in a different way: iji-Fenghuang was the fixed border, Paektu-san tended to be seen as a frontier, a shifting border of hope and threat, and the maritime border, being neither stable nor secure in Korean eyes, was both. Morris Rossabi investigates the specific foreign policy and relationship of the Ming Court towards the city state, Hami, located in the northwestern border region of China. He explains how the contemporary Ming policy was characterized by a certain realism about the 'Other' and that in this context Hami was supposed to function as a kind of buffer against the peoples of Central Asia.
Gudula Linck provides a concise survey on Chinese frontier poetry throughout the centuries. She presents various visions of frontiers, borders, and foreigners and is able to show that, however much these may have changed, a certain Chinese feeling of superiority was, as a rule, always present. China's border vision of Tibet is the subject of the investigation of Sabine Dabringhaus. After a brief survey on the relations between Tibet and China from the Tang up to and including the Qing dynasties, she discusses how the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty instrumentalized Tibetan Lamaism to control this southwestern neighbour politically.
Geoff Wade examines Chinese perceptions of themselves and their neighbours as they are reflected in Ming historiography. The Chinese often depicted themselves as the people who incarnated the correct moral virtues which contrasted with the Barbarian traditions of the 'Others'. In this context, Wade provides examples of how political and military actions against non-Chinese people were legitimated by this kind of manufactured higher ethics and eventually compares this habit with examples in contemporary China.
Roderich Ptak presents the Chinese views on the Paracel and Spratly Islands as they are reflected in geographical works from about 1000 to 1500. Historiographical evidence reveals that, as a rule, Song, Yuan, and early Ming texts do not contain references to these islands. As Ptak shows, this only changes in the 16th and 17th centuries. The islands are, however, rarely referred to as real islands or even regarded as part of the empire. The failed British occupation of Macaoin 1808 is the subject of Antonio Graça de Abreu. He describes in which way the Portuguese Miguel de Arriaga played off the British and the Chinese to secure Macao's status as a more or less 'independent' area and eventually sucessfully repelled the British.
The contribution of Thomas Höllmann introduces some aspects of the contacts of the Taiwan Alishan inhabitants with the Qing government in a region where fixed borders were non-existant. Ng Chin-keong ventures into China's heterogeneous and changing perceptions and treatment of her maritime border throughout the dynasties with the main emphasis on the late Ming and the Qing period. In this respect, he throws particular light on the evolution of the maritime defence policy of the empire and illustrates in which way during these time periods the sea was metamorphized to a natural defence barrier rather than being a means of easy access to lands elsewhere.
Sabine Dabringhaus and Roderich Ptak (eds), China and her Neighbours. Borders, Visions of the Other, Foreign Policy. 10th to 19th Century. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1997.
Dr Angela Schottenhammer was an IIAS individual research fellow between April 1996 and July 1998 and is now working as a research fellow at the Institute of Art, Martin-Luther-University of Hall-Wittenberg.