Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman (review)

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 82.1 (2022): 193–198 In these crucial respects, Land of Strangers remains peripherally engaged with a larger Qing borderland history that includes Manchus, Mongols, and Buddhists, among others. This larger history encompasses projects that were neither Confucian nor simplistically colonial but that did construct a Xinjiang imperial order memorialized as a golden age by Muslim authors such as Sayrāmī. This wider perspective does not overlook the import of Land of Strangers, most especially in terms of its revisions to anachronistic concepts that inform much work on contemporary Xinjiang and of its intimate accounts of ordinary Muslim negotiations and interpellations. It merely reorients the empire’s multiethnic communities marginally closer to the center— myopic Confucian civilizing projects notwithstanding—as the New Qing History, for all its visible limitations, has long clearly envisioned.