Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE-Twentieth Century CE)

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This romantically titled book explores the incorporation of Yunnan into China over a long period, from the second century BCE to the 20th century CE. Bin Yang suggests that the making of Yunnan over the course of 2,000 years is not only crucial to the development of imperial China, but also to the formation of East Asia and Southeast Asia. According to Yang, previous academic works on Yunnan's history have been somewhat problematic. While most Chinese scholars look at Yunnan with a northern Sino-centric perspective, Western scholars fail to explore Yunnan's incorporation by China as a macro-region. Adopting a trans-regional perspective, Between Winds and Clouds argues that both global interactions and Chinese colonialism accounted for the success of the incorporation of Yunnan by China.

Besides the Introduction, this book comprises of six chapters. Yang firstly demonstrates the significance of Yunnan in Eurasian communications through a brief examination of the Southwest Silk Road. The strategic significance of Yunnan led to intermittent external invasions. Chapter three thus examines the military conquests of Yunnan from the third century BCE to the 14th century CE, reframing them in the context of the transnational, cross-boundary or cross-regional...