Description: Eric Schluessel explores the late nineteenth-century encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He traces the emergence of new struggles around essential questions of identity, recasting the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism.
Review Quotes: In this fine monograph, Eric Schluessel describes the local articulation and hardening of boundaries between people in late Qing Xinjiang. Using Turkic, Manchu, and Chinese sources on Turpan, he introduces (among others) local elites, Hunanese Confucian statecraft ideologues, mediatory tongchi interpreters, and Chinese-speaking Muslim brokers. His narratives describe culture clashes, identity negotiation, gender ideologies, colonial discipline, and naming practices, persuasively and subtly connected to today's troubled conditions.--Jonathan N. Lipman, author of Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China