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Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 17591864. By JAMES A. MILLWARD. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. XXii, 353 pp. $55.00.
Qing Central Asia-Xinjiang-the "New Dominion"-the very names suggest a rich history of Chinese explorations and military forays into inhospitable deserts, rivers that vanish under the sands, forbidding mountain ranges somehow traversed by Silk Road merchants and Buddhist pilgrims, unhappy princesses married to fierce barbarians for the sake of border peace, and a Tang concubine's passion for the famed Hami melons (pp. 23-24). China's "New Frontier," which became a province only in 1884, is as vast as Alaska and more than three times as large as France (p. 21). James Millward, who teaches at Georgetown University, has written a lively history of the Qing conquest and administration of the area, ending his narrative before the late nineteenth-century disgraces of territorial losses to Russia and particularly examining how the dynasty managed to finance the conquest and administration of its new possession. This is a much needed account, freshly researched in the Beijing archives as well as in a great variety of published government documents and campaign histories, travellers' accounts, the memoirs of modern explorers, and even Millward's personal trips to the area.
The book's title reveals much of its message. "Beyond the Pass" refers to the unknown, fearsome west-today's Central...