Description:
Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs is a tightly-focused collection of studies that explores how Qing governing institutions and strategies worked in actual practice to address the practical problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex empire from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It highlights the Qing regime's ability to accommodate an astonishing variety of local governing environments in the management of short-term contingent crises and long-term evolutionary problems caused by changes in the social-economic fabric of Greater China during the Qing period. It argues that the Qing state should be viewed as a system of indirect rule because of its accommodative strategies of governance and its reliance on sub- and extra-bureaucratic power groups at the local level. Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs makes an important contribution to our understanding of the practical operation of Qing government, and its readability, thematic coherence, and inclusion of professionally-drawn maps and enhanced Chinese woodblock illustrations make this work attractive and accessible to students of late imperial China as well as Qing specialists.
Review Quotes:
The collection brings together a rich range of scholarly papers that singly and together make a welcome contribution to our understanding of Qing administration. The editors do an excellent job of summing up [the] themes in a succinct, clearly written introduction. The book's title inadequately reflects the book's contribution... the chapters in toto provide a broader understanding of the nature of Qing administration than simply that of crisis management. Given the broad contribution of this collection, its readership should not be limited to specialists in Qing administration.
-- "The China Journal"