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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
This paper focuses on the Qing era as a crucial moment for the organization and cartographic representation of borderlands, where new ideologies, geopolitical factors, and administrative practices shaped the relations between the Imperial center and frontier populations. Specifically, I explore the production and circulation of local maps in Qing-Mongolia, which involved a complex negotiation process between the Imperial Center and local Mongolian populations. My study examines three main mapping projects initiated by the Qing state in 1805, 1864, and 1890, and explores the tensions that arose between the central state and the Mongol local actors, who were put in charge of drawing maps and setting boundary-markers (oboos) between banners. Throughout the 19th century, the Qing state experimented with multiple techniques and aesthetics of spatial representation aimed at consolidating its power over frontiers, defining boundaries, and enforcing sovereignty on the Mongol steppe. Hundreds of maps of Mongolian banners were commissioned by the central state, produced by local Mongol leaders drawing on their own Inner Asian cultural repertoire, and were adapted for institutional compilations such as the Huidian tu. While Mongol local maps shaped the geographical imagination of the state by the Qing political elite, tensions inherent to the cartographic process revealed limitations to state power and discontinuity between geographies of the frontier and China Proper. Ultimately, the Mongol local territorial organization and geographical categories challenged the frameworks imposed by the state, as local leaders advocated for their indigenous practices and perspectives on territory and geography.
Anne-Sophie Pratte
Harvard University