Mirrors of History: The Poetics of Tibetan Kingship in the Time of Empire

Mirrors of History centers on the early 18th century imperial encounter between the Central Tibet under the rule of the Buddhist king Polhane Sonam Topgyal (1689-1747) and the ascendent Qing empire, its broader Inner Asia context, and its legacy through to the modern day. Tracing the intersection of multi-ethnic imperial rule, elite literary and historiographical culture, and Buddhist political theory this project draws on a multilingual research in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Manchu sources supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Tsadra Foundation and Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Examining courtly histories of the formative Qing- Central Tibetan encounter written in the first half of the 18th century, I argue Tibetan and Inner Asian partners in the Qing project imagined Polhane through the lens of Buddhist sacral kingship while simultaneously envisioning imperial rule in Tibet as project of trans-regional Buddhist governance through inherited Indic literary aesthetics and Buddhist political theory. Following the afterlives of these histories, my research also practices a critique of modern notions of history that underpin nationalist historiographies of Sino-Tibetan relations written in China, India, and the West during the 20th century.