The History of China - #312 - Qing 42: Frontiers, Pt. 1: The Vastness Devours Us - Of Willow Palisades & Reincarnation Permits

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

The world is coming to Qing's doorstep, but it has a whole other set of problems along its own frontiers... Less chronologically tied-down than most of our episodes, today we look at two of the Qing Empire's four major "inner frontier zones" and how they - in spite of often getting upstaged by the "flashier" elements of the 1800s & Qings clashes with the wider world, many have played an even larger part in its imperial decay than the British East India Co. could've ever hoped to achieve. We start off today with Manchuria & Mongolia... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. It was just another holiday party until Michelle arrived with a chocolate basque cheesecake. Two rich cocoa, caramelized top, which Michelle claimed to have just whipped together. But the evidence told another story. An empty PC box, a receipt in her purse. All right, Susan, I bought the PC chocolate basque cheesecake. It was just $11. Can you stop true cramming me?

Can I have another slice? Try the season's biggest hits from the PC Holiday Insiders Report. Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 312, The Frontiers, Part 1, The Vastness Devours us of Willow Palisades and Reincarnation Permits. In the year of Guayhaihai, traveling along the road, we passed the Liu Tiao Bien. They had inserted willow branches and tied ropes to mark the boundary of Mongolia. From the south, it reached Josan, to the west as far as Shanhai Guan. Whoever crossed privately was subject to severe punishment.

Thus, it was called the Willow Palisade. Gao Shi Qi, Diary of an Imperial Envoy's Eastern Tour, 1682. Reincarnating Living Buddhas should carry out application and approval procedures. The application and approval procedure is, the management organization at the monastery applying for the Living Buddha Reincarnation should submit applications for reincarnations to the local religious affairs departments at the level of People's Government. Once the People's Government above county level has made suggestions, the People's Government Religious Affairs Department reports upwards, an examination and approval shall be made by the provincial or autonomous

regional people's government religious affairs department. Once an application for a living Buddha's reincarnation has received approval, the corresponding Buddhist Association shall establish a reincarnation guidance system and shall establish a search team to look for the reincarnate sole child, and search affairs shall be carried out under the leadership of the guidance team. The reincarnate soul child shall be recognized by the provincial or autonomous regional Buddhist Association, or the China Buddhist Association, in accordance with religious rituals and historically established systems. No group or individual may, without authorization, carry out any activities related to searching

for or recognizing reincarnating living Buddhist soul children. State Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5. The People's Republic of China, 2007. Imagine to peer across the world. world and know the enemy's secrets, to place our thoughts into the minds of your leaders, to make your teachers teach the true version of history, your soldiers attack on our command. We will be everywhere at once, more powerful than a whisper, invading your dreams, thinking your thoughts for you while you sleep.

We will change you, Dr. Jones, all of you from the inside. We will turn you into us. And the best part, you won't even know it's happening. Comrade Dr. Erina Spalco, Indiana Jones, and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Last time, we took the time to set up the dominoes of the Qing Dynasty, all in their nice rows as we ticked officially over into the 19th century. We focused primarily on the problems in the underlying frameworks of both its government and society, but also the sheer unpreparedness with which China came to confront the wider world all at once. Today we have a similarly mammoth task before us,

though this time one that's a bit more gritty and a lot more dusty, that is mapping out the physical challenges that faced maintaining a realm quite so immense as what the Middle Kingdom had not that long ago become. We are headed back into Inner Asia. Great Ching's fateful encounter with the European powers has certainly taken the majority of the column inches when it comes to explaining the humiliation and collapse of the once great and mighty empire.

But there are other, and some might say less sexy, factors that contributed as least as much to what would prove to be its fatal existential crisis, and perhaps even more. They are the rapid doubling of the empire's geographical size, and the equally rapid doubling of its population, specifically its Han Chinese supermajority. Of course, neither of these are exclusive or without substantial interplay and overlap. They're multiplying factors on the Richter scale of civilizational collapse, and together would all compel China's direction into what would become its modern era. Let's first address the issue of geographical size altogether.

The Qing Empire of the early 1800s was China at its all-time territorial maximum. We've already looked rather extensively at the process of creating that greater Qing prosperity sphere along the marches of the Western frontier in what was once called the Zhenggar Khanate over the course of the 18th century. Not only Xinjiang, but also Manchuria, Mongolia, Qinghai, and Tibet had become become, either in whole or at least part, possessions of or tributaries to the dragon throne of Beijing. And while that certainly changed the lines of maps of Asia, it likewise would become the locus of a political, economic, and cultural metamorphosis for China on par with

those wrought by the effects of European interaction. Joseph Fletcher put it, quote, the indigenous social and economic processes of a demographically and territorially expanded China no less than the pressures from outside have underlain the modern transformation of Chinese society that is still underway, end quote. With the closing of the frontier following the conquest and depopulating of Jungaria,

Qing had largely turned its attentions elsewhere, namely the perennial problems of managing the internal empire proper, as well as the all of a sudden right up in their front, faces coastline and all the crises that came with it. But that certainly didn't mean that the far-western inland expanses had gone away, or its people had become any less uneasy with certain aspects of their very foreign overlords. Those areas, each in their own particular ways, would come to be digested into the empire in a more permanent capacity. But it would often be an exceedingly slow digestion, and one that to this day remains only

partial and ongoing. In spite of holding the Western reaches in their entirety since the end of the prior century, it wouldn't even be until nearly a century later, the 1860s and 70s, that the quote-unquote modern transformation of inner Asia would truly begin. They would be kicked off by the Muslim rebellions of that period, both the more widely known Dungen rebellions of the Hui people across the northwestern frontiers of Shand Xi, Gansu, and Xinjiang, but also the Panthe rebellion that gripped Yunnan over much of the same period. Many empires seem to come about becoming, well, empires, in an almost haphazard, Mr. Magu-esque fashion. The Romans were famously cited, very wryly, by Cicero, as winning its vast territories pro-fidei out pro-salute, that is to say, sheerly out of self-defense and border security, or put even more

starkly by Tacitus, quote, creating a wasteland and terming at peace, and quote. This is, of course, a historical canard, just like the similar charge of the American Empire tripping over its own shoelaces and acquiring the rest of the continent. While the tail, may at times seem to be wagging the dog, there's always actually a will behind it. For Great Qing, territorial expansion had been both a personal feather in the cap of its two most legendary rulers, the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, respectively, as if you could forget, but also the fulfillment of a divinely mandated national imperial directive. To once again borrow a term from the American experiment, conquering, pacifying,

and making a unified whole the entire bounds of the realm of Tianxia, was no less than an imperial manifest destiny. But as for the broader and more long, range historical effects of these decisions, well, there were, as ever, unintended side effects. The spread of both Han Chinese populations, taking along with them, of course, their culture to these newly opened up regions, was a thoroughly unintended consequence in the Manchu Qing's empire-building project. Initially, in fact, the Qing government had wished for almost precisely the opposite, the Han populace two remain exactly where they had always been in the core of China itself,

and for the peripheral marches to remain along the peripheries and peopled with the empire's peripheral peoples, like always. But in the evergreen words of everyone's favorite, chaotician, Dr. Ian Malcolm, life, uh, finds a way. From Fletcher, quote,

the dynasties need to make full use of Han Chinese talent, especially in the empire's non-Han territories, and to encourage Han Chinese citizens. settlers to people the Inner Asian frontiers, became evident to the Qing government only dimly and belatedly, and in spite of the Qing government's efforts throughout the 18th century to prevent this expansion, end quote. The marches of Inner Asia's frontier were, after all, the territories, the very homelands and cultural preserves of the dynasty's bannermen. The Chinese should, of course, stay in China, and its wild borderlands would be best left to

and managed by the minority rulers and their indigenous vassals. As of 1800, there were four of these real carve-out frontier regions, Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. And for reference, as of today, two and a half out of those four remain essentially unchanged as such. Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia remain today as nominally ethnic autonomous, regions within the People's Republic of China, along with Guangxi and Ming Xia rounding out the five, while only Manchuria has been fully integrated into the modern nation's provincial structure. Theoretically, at least, these frontier zones were to be governed in a much

more locally dependent and interactive means than an outright province, and with a likewise bespoke unto ad hoc means of extracting compliance and tax revenue from each. They were supposed to be fully self-supporting regions that could collect enough revenue to manage their own internal expenses, while sending extra on over to the capital, in a much more personal and direct means than the cogwork bureaucracy of the provinces. With the sole exceptions of Mongolia and the Manchurian province of Feng Tien, none of them ever proved able to even meet this baseline expectation. Now, just to get this out of the way so that I don't feel like I'm burying the lead on any of this, it's going to come as no surprise to anybody that it will be Xinjiang that will come to stand out as the kind of anti-crown jewel of the empire in all of these respects.

Spoiler alert, but there it is. Over the whole of its time under the aegis of the Imperium, it would never once manage to produce more than or even a remotely compensatory amount of revenue to offset the constant grinding cost of its military occupation, pacification, and associated expenditures. Xinjiang, in spite of all the pomp and preening regarding its integration into the realm, remained in every respect the money pit to Qing's Tom Hanks and Shelley Long. The justification for all that, then, and get ready to hear this a lot when we get to the subject,

also now, was that Xinjiang served as a lot. Great Qing's gateway to the rest of Eurasia, and especially the territories and people even further west into the Asian interior, such as the Kazakh nomads, the Kyrgyz mountain tribes, the cities of Tashkent and Berkara, Bolor and Badakhshan, and even the crumbling edifices of the Afghan Duranis. Each of these was viewed in Beijing as a de facto, if not quite de jorei, tributary polity, expected to show due deference and formal homage to the empire. Sometimes this was even acknowledged by those supposed vassals,

but just as often it was a completely one-sided parisocial relationship imagined entirely by the Qing court. But we will actually be getting into that particular sand trap in far more detail next time, because today we're going to focus on the two inland frontiers nearest and dearest to the Qing overlords in their Beijing palaces. first their own heartland, the three provinces of Manchuria itself, and then we'll move on next door for their Mongol kin to the northwest. The whole westward endeavor had been underscored for more than a century at this point by the 1689 signing of the Treaty of Nurchinsk between the Qing and Tsarist Russia. It had clearly spelled out and delineated for the first time ever that Tianxia had an outer

extent, a line past which some other equal power held total legal sovereignty. Yet, in spite of that fundament-cracking tectonic shift in its own cosmolegal worldview, Beijing remained remarkably, almost inexplicably, blaze on the actual operational management of any effective border policy that would secure its asserted rights. This is perhaps most effectively summarized by the sheer inexcusable negligence, Qing officiates showed in 1727, Wintercheng's follow-up treaty of Chiakta stipulated a physical demarcation of permanent land borders between China and Russia be laid onto the land itself via stone markers north of the Amur River along Manchuria's

northernmost reaches. But the problem was it was laid in the extremely wrong places. The line was set in stone, depending on the specific area, somewhere between 50 to 130,000, miles south of what the Qing government had agreed to, resulting in more than 23,000 square miles of territory simply being written off by Beijing. Not by the Russians, of course, who you'd better believe, absolutely seize on the Chinese gimmie and continue to settle across the Amur region over the rest of the 1700s. The story of Manchuria at the beginning of the 19th century is therefore the story of a once-remote Tanguskic forest homeland, already turning into one of China's future agricultural and industrial powerhouses. The earlier pattern of Manchu domination through banner

garrisons and tribal connections was breaking down, and Han Chinese immigrants were moving in, bringing with them language and culture, and linking Manchuria both socially and economically with China proper. Not for nothing, the sacred homeland of the dynasty that had spent three centuries deciding who was allowed to be Chinese, was itself one of the first and most complete regions to undergo total signification. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. To be sure, the Qing Manchu nobles were deadly serious about keeping Manchuria for the Manchurians. They had famously erected and maintained the Lo Tiao Bien, or the Willow Palisade,

a 1,500-mile-long living border marker made out of, you guessed it, willow trees. A double line of them spaced about one Li, or half-kilometer, apart. with the clearance between being kept totally clear and dotted every few kilometers with manned guard posts. A Berlin Wall, Korean DMZ, or Trump border wall, of its own time. Stark, showy, expensive, and ultimately completely futile. Quote, by the end of the 18th century, Manchuria's population probably exceeded a million, and by mid-19th century, it was about three times that number. end quote. By 1800, any real sense of keeping the Chinese out of Manchuria had fallen into

the imperial court's ambivalent blind spot. This was especially obvious in the primary province of the region, Feng Tian, and its capital, Mukden, today Shenyang. But even the more rustic frontier zones of Jilin and Heelong Jiang were beginning to feel the acute effects of the Chinese influx. Though there were still the occasional official pushes to limit further northeastern migration, they were sporadic, unevenly enforced, and typically abandoned pretty shortly after implementation. This seeming shoulder-struck mentality, on behalf of the Qing Emperor and his courtiers, Rang is especially strange, given that this wasn't just any frontier zone we're talking about, after all. It was their own ethnic homeland.

It was to serve not only as a cultural time capsule of the Qing Banner's own traditional Manchunis, but also as a fallback, last-stand position, should the unthinkable ever happen, and the House of Ising Gioro lose their grip on political power. You'd certainly think that they'd go out of their way to keep that area extra protected from the creeping cultural assimilation of the Han, and yet, by the 19th century, none of the traditional reasons for maintaining Manchurian apartness were considered especially compelling anymore. The Manchuria as final bastion rationale had likewise given ground in the face of now more than a century and a half of comfortable and evident contentment with Qingruh over the empire.

China was theirs. The Manchu's had no need to hide nor cause to flee. Even the underlying economic motivations for doing so, guarding the government's monopoly on prized regional goods like ginseng, furs, pearls, and gold, had begun to give way before the inexorable economic logic of the times. Monopolyistic protectionism was only costing the Qing money, as it could be amply demonstrated that the Chinese populace could more effectively and profitably harvest such resources, as well as implement far more sophisticated and higher yielding farming practices to drive up vital food production. The empire's population explosion likewise compelled northward migrations.

Quote, since southern Manchuria was already largely saturated with Han Chinese farmers, more and more migrants kept moving northward. The Manchurian frontier authorities, unable to prevent this influx, had begun to enroll the Han settlers and to tax them, and quote. In all likelihood, in many cases, the local authorities probably even encouraged such movements, as these new settlers greatly sped the development of the region's natural resources, thus enriching everyone all up the chain. The cumulative effects of all these proved profound.

By the end of the 18th century, urban and town populations in both of the once-outlying frontier provinces of Manchuria, again Hei Longjiang and Ji Lin, were as high as 80 to 90% Han Chinese. Almost everyone in Manchuria spoke or read at least some Chinese, and even large sections of the native Manchu population have been so effectively sinusized that they'd lost their mother tongue altogether. Moreover, seeing the Hanza riding on the wall, even the central government, in spite of their own official bans, had begun sending Han officials to govern their own Chinese communities there.

The big outlier here, funnily enough, was, wait for it, the Mongols. As cousin Tunguskik peoples to the Manchus themselves, the Eastern Mongols had been early and valued members of the Qing Coalition, and had been, as some, such, allowed to largely stead where they may across the northern Taiga forests and steps. As remote and nomadic as they tended to remain, markedly unlike the by now widely agriculturalized and sedentary Manchus, the Mongols remained almost wholly unaffected by the sweeping currents of acculturation into the Sinosphere. Although Han merchants and Heilongjiang could do business with Manchus in the Chinese language,

they often had to learn Mongolian to trade with the Mongols. north of the Amur, where the population was primitive and extremely sparse, people who could speak Chinese must have been few indeed, and quote. That outermost frozen edge of the empire, beyond the far shores of the Black Dragon River, remained so remote that even by 1765, the central government had only deigned to undertake a single general survey, the results of which were reported as, quote, There were no signs of human life on the northern bank of the river, and the region was bitter cold, with no pasture and no animals."

End quote. Very charming. Of course, the fact was this outer fringe was far from lifeless, though it did tend to attract the roughest sorts. Especially during the earlier years of the dynasty, Monturia had been used by the Qing as, well, what would be a more appropriate word here than gulag for their political enemies. Its outer embankments had served as a place of exile for Chinese criminals and prisoners. which might at first sound self-defeating, but keep in mind, they were expected to basically

work there until they died, and in the bosom of hostile Manchu country. It would not prove to be a foolproof system. By 1796, the government had substantially reduced the number of convicts being shipped to the north, as systemic problems were already cropping up with the practice. The short of it is, the Bannerman who were set as the effective wardens of these enslaved Chinese criminals, were frequently too poor to be able to reliably support that imposition. As such, it became economically viable for both sides of the equation to simply purchase liberation. Though the vast majority of these freedmen did indeed move right back out of the frozen hell of

Northern Asia and to China proper, enough remained in Manchuria to have an enduring and over time cumulative effect. Yet another population of legally dubious. Chinese in Manchuria were those who had not been brought there in chains, but snuck in to gain their fortunes. Wherever a government chooses to set up an exclusive monopoly, there would be opportunities to exploit that lack of market competition to one's own benefit, if only one were able to skirt government strictures. This proved easy enough in the distant wilds of Manchuria. quote, these were poachers in the imperial preserves, hunters, trappers, ginseng gatherers, gold miners, and robber bands.

The number of these outlaws had grown considerably in the 18th century and continued to grow in the 19th, end quote. By 1811, these hei-ren, literally black men, but it means criminals or outlaws, had so disturbed the tribal frontier regions that the governor-general of Gielin was forced to send in troops to drive them out of the northern hills and forests. But the authorities found that protecting the frontier from Han Chinese outlaws was no easy matter because communication was so difficult. What all of this meant is that by the opening decades of the 1800s,

the homeland of the Manchu's had irreversibly become just another part of the empire in all but name. It was profitable, but apart from small pockets along the outermost edges, it had lost much of what had made it unique or significant to the unrelenting surge of one of the most truly ironic instances of auto-settler colonialism in world history. Fletcher puts it, quote, in spite of repeated government measures, the bannermen were rapidly becoming pauperized

and grew increasingly dependent upon subsidies from the Qing government. The culturally dynamic example, which more and more of them began to emulate, was that of the Han Chinese. As time went on, not only the Bannerman, but also many of the tribal peoples began to adopt Chinese culture and fall into the orbit of Han tastes, Han markets, and Han ways of doing things, end quote. At Desjardin, we speak business.

We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear-off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the... the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us, and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk. Business. Let's now traverse those sweeping hills and forested mountain slopes due west from Manchuria, and move on to our next frontier stop, the steps and deserts of Mongolia itself.

But the end of the 18th century, the lands that had once birthed mighty Temagin, and now secreted away his bones, had fallen on hard times, indeed, even harder than usual. Quote, Mongolian nomadism had thoroughly decayed. The old days of nomad power and independence were gone. War, once the basis of nomad glory and solidarity, was a thing of the past, and the Qing had tightly bound the Mongols of both inner and outer Mongolia, despite the mobility of their way of life, to the Middle Kingdom. End quote. There was very little in effective indigenous local government over this scattered populace.

Roughly 2.6 million Mongol speakers lived in Inner Mongolia, with another 700,000 or so in outer Mongolia north of the Gobi, and perhaps another 200,000 spread across Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Qinghai. In the closer and far more important, Inner Mongolia, or in Chinese, Neemonggu, Qing military control held the populace tight enough that any claim of regional autonomy was very much in name only. But once again, the vastness of the outer Mongolian marches had long rendered as trivial almost any attempt at direct imperial oversight. Instead, military rule under the banner system prevailed. The Jhasaaks, or banner princes, ruled over their respective Hoshun's. These were

further subdivided into Jalan's, or regiments, each of which contained six sumons, or arrows. In exchange for their regulated but largely uncontested power over their banners, the Jhasaaks were obliged to annually pay tribute to the throne via a highly specific and regimented gift-giving process. Quote, the most famous of these tributes were the outer Mongolian Khan's so-called nine whites, theoretically composed of eight white horses and one white camel, although by 1800, the nine whites consisted of a variety of changing items, including such things as furs, wild beasts hides, and choice domestic livestock. In return, the Mongolian tributaries received gifts of silk, cottons, porcelains, gold and silver. And there is reason to suppose that because of these

return gifts, which were indeed at least equal in value to the tribute, the Qing government did not consider the presentation of tribute to be an economic burden to the tributaries." Under the hereditary nobility were the Mongol commoners, collectively known as the Arad. Rather than being Qing citizens outright, the Arad were primarily banner subjects themselves, further subdivided into Sumun subjects, theoretically only liable to provide tribute for the Qing court, and the Hamjilga bondsmen, who were to provide the Jasaq's personal support. Yet, by the early 1800s, such distinctions had largely broken down, along with much else of the traditional tribal edifice. Influxes of wealth, and the social gaps that that inevitably

created and exacerbated, had rendered the old social strata increasingly obsolete. Two further strata existed within the Mongol framework of the 19th century, the ecclesiastic disciple class and that of the slaves. The disciples, called Shabinar, were tax-exempt and legally considered as belonging to either a certain Buddhist monastery or directly to the household of particularly influential Kubulgans, that is, reincarnating llamas. It was quite the rarefied lifestyle, if you could get it. At the polar opposite end of Mongolia's social pyramid were, of course, the slaves, whom for the most part the government had reduced to that condition as punishment for criminal

offenses. Slavery as such was not an indelible inherited social category. It may sound at this point like Mongolia had remained relatively untouched by Manchu overlordship, but think for a moment, if you will, back to what we've covered in the overall Mongol Qing relationship up to this point. You know, Gao Dan, Kangxi, the Junggars, Qianlong. Yeah, no. They had completely flattened and then rewired the whole place, and not for the betterment of the locals. The banner system itself was one of the primary means of not only yoking Mongol military prowess to the Qing imperial machine, but also in disrupting and fundamentally weakening the independent power base of the Mongol Jhasaq princes themselves. After all, even a cursory glance at step

history tells you one thing. Never, ever let the Mongols start making decisions as a cohesive whole. They'll be talking cons and spirit banners before the tea goes cold. And that, to an empire, is catastrophic. The banner system thus served to, quote, divide the Mongols and sever their traditional lines of tribal authority, end quote. Pasturelands were carefully divided and parceled out to the various princes, and then fixed in place such that none of them could expand or acquire an over-preponderance of power and support.

That the most powerful tribes had been singled out to be divided and all now reported to different autonomous banners, reinforced this sense of isolation and disjointedness. Inter-tribal management was likewise finally tuned to make large-scale decision-making impossible. The once-freely ranging tribal domains, or Imox, had been reorganized into leagues, or Chigul Gan, which were only allowed to meet together once every three years, and only to mediate inter-tribal disputes, and were the whole while closely monitored by Qing authorities. The captains general to these leagues were not appointed by acclaim or lineage,

but by the imperial government, which of course had the power to dismiss and replace them at will should any of them start getting any funny ideas. Perhaps the most infamous example of this occurred in the year 1800, when Setschen Khan Sangjaiidorgi, a direct descendant of the Borgian ruling house descended from Jenghis himself, was stripped of his positions and titles as League Captain General, and thereafter even his descendants were denied the khan ship.

Religion also played a huge role in this taming of the Mongols to Qing rule. The Gelagspa sect, or the Yellow Church of Tibet, you may recall, had come to not only be embraced by much of the Mongol people, but by the 19th century had positively eclipsed their traditional shamanistic faith of Tangriism. This mass conversion had suited Qing interests just fine, especially since the Yellow Church revered above nearly any other figure, the offices of the Kutuktu. the living Badasatfas that reincarnated life after life and served as the faith's quasi-eternal leaders. Just think again of the Dalai Lama, and you've got the exact gist.

And who controlled the Mongolian katuktuos? Why, the imperial government, of course. They were pampered and lived in luxury, but mostly in Beijing itself, especially in the case of the senior and most powerful ecclesiastical heads. But the Qing government had not stopped at just the shepherds. it had also been sure to divide the flock, and along the most natural boundary that they could think of, inner versus outer Mongolia.

The traditional yellow church religious leader, as careful listeners of the Galdan Kangxi series arc may recall me tripping over time and time again, was the Jebzon Dambah Ketuktu, long held as the third most important and powerful figure in the whole religion, right after the Dalai Lama and his second, the Panchen Lama. They were both in Tibet,

which we will get to next time, which meant that, by rights, the Jebsam Damdak Khuduktu was the uncontested religious head of all Mongolia, which, you may have guessed, didn't work so well for the Qing, who feared, again, historically justifiably, that unity among the Mongols in any capacity

was a catastrophically bad idea. So they fixed it by breaking it. They backed a different Khatuktu, and there were 12 in total at any given time, so they had options. They chose the Kanskaya Kutuktu to become, in essence, the religious head of inner Mongolia, where the vast majority of Mongolians actually lived, while leaving the Jebson Damba as the head of traditional outer Mongolia,

the barren northern wastes hardly anyone wanted. On this new religious head, they heaped honors and rewards, including not only a mansion in the capital, but another monastery all for himself in the Buddhist primary city in Mongolia at the time, Dolanur. They were not aiming to fully devalue the Jebzambah Khatuktu, merely to build up this new religious spiritual leader to be his rough, equal counterweight, and thus make both far more controllable.

They further went ahead and nipped any possibility of the development of some especially scary religious political crossover event by heavily discouraging the quote-unquote finding of any reincarnated llamas among the Mongolian aristocracy. No double-dipping. This kind of hyper-paranoid micromanagement of a peripheral faith's inner workings is such a staple of China and Chinese history that it remains ongoing to this very day. You're no doubt aware of the near-life-long row between the People's Republic of China and the 14th and current incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Well, all the way back in 1995, the Galeigspa Church of Tibet announced that it had found the incarnation of the 11th Panchen Lama, the then six-year-old Gedhun Choichi Nymia. But just three days later, on May 17th, Chinese authorities kidnapped and then permanently disappeared the child.

And he's never been seen again. Instead, they had a different selection that chose, surprise, a candidate of their own liking, the following. following November. The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Church remains steadfast in their refusal to recognize this podperson Lama as legitimate, while Beijing continues to insist, and this is a true fact, not an AI hallucination, that as of 2007, all deities, saints, immortals, extraplanar entities, and all other such beings capable of voluntary reincarnation, must submit their application for said earthly reimbodiment to the State Religious Affairs Bureau prior to any such

transcendental action taken, which must be approved by the state according to the relevant rules and regulations. After which, they will be issued a Hōpho Zheng Shu, literally a living Buddha permit, without which they would be considered an illegal and invalid immortal reincarnation of a deity. This is, I feel compelled to once again reiterate, a real law passed this century by the officially atheist government of the PRC. Now, we get to everyone's favorite point in the program, the section on the ongoing process of religious syncretism and how it related to Chinese integration of Mongolian culture into the imperial polity. Yay! To, oh so briefly review, syncretism is the process by which two

or more formerly unrelated philosophies, beliefs, or ideologies come to intersect, interact, and ultimately begin to blend and merge into a new and combined, or syncretized, way of thought. So for us, it's going to be really 101 level stuff. The process in this case was much more than a passive or unintentional recombination, though. It was a process shaped and guided by the Qing imperial government itself in a deliberate capacity in order to, quote, fuse Lamaism with Chinese religious ideas insofar as Mongolian religious sentiment would allow, end quote. One particularly noteworthy example of this push was the linking of three of the Mongol Buddhist divinities of the Yellow Hat School with the indigenous Chinese god of war,

the deified version of Guan Yu, Guan Yu, Guan Di. The leader of the Inner Mongolian Church, again the Kangskaya Khatuktu, was quote-unquote encouraged by the government to pen a prayer in his own hand in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Manchurian language to express his own strong support for the project. By the end of the 18th century, the Qing were hard at work, the widespread construction of temples to Guandhi across all Chinese provinces bordering the Central Asian wilds, linking to him Vaisavrana, itself equated across Mongolia with the folk hero Gayser Khan, along with Gwandae himself already being associated with the indigenous Mongolian god of war, Daijin Tangri. At the same time, omens and prophecies regarding Guandhi and his power

were translated into Mongolian and distributed widely, fueling the religious fusion into its imperially approved recasting. Quote, in the second half of the 19th century, Qing supported Mongolian theologians would explicitly enthrone Guandhi slash Gasser Khan as a tutelary deity of the Buddhist religion,

end quote. The reality on the ground was that this monastic establishment had become an economic force unto itself, one funded less by spontaneous piety than by the steady diversion of people, land, and labor into its orbit.

The Jossacks, ever eager to demonstrate largesse or curry clerical legitimacy, funneled an increasing number of Shabee households into the monasteries as hereditary bondsmen. They also handed over wide swaths of pastoralant to support the temple's herds. Once incorporated, these bonded families found themselves dund without respite. Monks circulated through the banners, extracting offerings, and very few ordinary herdsmen had the social latitude to refuse. The result was predictable enough, lavish expenditure on Llamist ritual display, even including large butter sculptures of deities, while the rank-and-file pastoralists often starved. By the early 19th century, the Jebsumdamba Khatuktu of Outer Mongolia had accumulated so many Shabinar and so much pasturland that his domain now functioned as a de facto separate I-Mogg entirely, complete with an office of Shabies to run the whole machine.

The Qing effectively acknowledged this in 1822 when they elevated that office's treasurer to the rank of League Captain General, a quiet admission of where real power now lived. Because the monasteries and their shabby dependents were tax-exempt, the fiscal load shifted ever more heavily onto the remaining banner households outside of ecclesiastical control. And the monetaries didn't just sit on this wealth, but put it to work. Property became capital, and the most profit. line of business, by far, was in lending that money out.

In the Mongolian social imagination, the Buddhist church and its doctrinal world came to serve as a counterweight to the older, secular culture rooted in steppe lifeways, and the age-old jingesid political charisma. A few groups, like the Old Barga, held on to shamanism for longer, but among the boyrats, shamanistic traditions remained strong well into the late 18th century. But even there, the first decades of the 1800s, saw a concerted campaign to root out the old order. Shamanistic garments and ritual objects were collected and then burned. This, however, proved unable to erase everything.

The already ongoing process of Mongolian synchronization with Buddhism allowed many shamanist forms to persist under new Buddhist names and ritual veneers. Still, as a coherent social force, tangrious shamanism had ceased to be a viable competitor. Meanwhile, the monastic system vacuumed up ever more talent. Across the 18th and 19th centuries, more and more sharp, ambitious young Mongol men took the monastic vows. Not all retreated into abbots and monasteries, roughly two-thirds continued to live and work within their home banners.

And it remained entirely normal for an avowed monk to be the bondsman of a lay noble, underscoring how intertwined monastic and aristocratic structures had become. But with each passing year, Moore did withdraw fully into that monastic life, and with them went an ever larger share of Mongolia's productive capacity. Pasture, livestock, and grain that might have sustained households were instead redirected into maintaining the immense ceremonial machine of the Lamaist establishment. One of the more counterintuitive features of the 19th century step was that even as the actual Mongolian population was shrinking, the number of monasteries in Mongolia was doing the opposite. By the early 20th century, Inner Mongolia alone may have housed over a thousand such monasteries. Outer Mongolia added another 700 more, not even counting the explosion of smaller temples.

The clerical footprint was enormous, but the human pipeline feeding it was even more staggering. Estimates for Inner Mongolia suggest that between 30 and 65% of all males took vows at some point in their life, effectively at least one son per household. For outer Mongolia, a 1918 figure puts the proportion at about 45%. By way of comparison, the late chain estimate for Tibet, a society very much stereotyped and not unfairly as monastic heavy, that was only about 33%. Now, we can't map these numbers precisely back onto the situation in 1800, but the general trajectory is clear, leading up to the generation that we do have data on. With that ever-increasing monasticization came a rather unexpected byproduct, urbanization.

By 1800, the large monasteries had become nuclei around which quasi-urban settlements had begun to form. This occurred first in Inner Mongolia and then radiated outward from there. The two largest of these proto-cities clustered around places like Urga, which was the personal residence of the Jebzondanga Katuktu, Uliastai, and Kovt, where temples, markets, and military garrisons all coexisted. These were not towns in either the European or Chinese sense, but they were, unmistakably, towns in function, dense sites of commerce, clerical administration,

Chinese merchant activity, as well as the usual contingent of artisans and the wandering poor. By the 19th century, Mongolia had become much more spatially anchored than its nomadic self-conception would ever like to admit. Such an urban commercial shift fed directly into the next structural transformation of the region, the near total penetration of Chinese trade into the steppe economy. Now, traditionally, Mongols bartered livestock and animal products at the step's edge, or in the course of tightly regulated tribute missions to Beijing. A few Central Asian Muslim caravans handled long-distance exchange, but beyond that,

international trade remained very limited and largely in-kind, that is to say, non-monetized. There was no Mongolian merchant class to speak of, is what I'm saying. Even their trade with Russia, formalized at Kiyakta in 1728, ended up funneled through the Han Chinese commercial house apparatus, which the chain quietly allowed to monopolize almost the entirety of the border economy. These monasteries, whether they meant to or not, became the infrastructure around which all the rest of this was built. Unlike the mobile nomad encampments, monastic compounds offered something new, permanence. The capacity for warehouses, market depots, secure operating bases for Chinese merchants to then push deeper into the interior.

Han traders from Beijing and Shanxi could now work the step with relative safety, cultivating Mongolian tastes for tobacco, tea, cloth, and an ever-widening range of Chinese manufacturers. Goods that had once been only aristocratic luxuries now slid into the category of everyday layman's necessity. And as the monasteries themselves grew wealthier, even the monks joined the demand, bankrolled, of course, by their ever greater extractions from the laity. This was not a viable situation. Popular resentment was sure to follow. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, inner Mongolian imogs such as Tushit Khan and Session Khan saw recurrent outbursts of anti-Chinese violence.

Traders beaten, warehouses looted, and accounting ledgers destroyed. monasteries and common Mongols were not always in alignment even with one another. Yet in spite of such pogromatic outbursts, the combined effect of monastic settlements, clerical economic dominance, and the Qing administrative apparatus ensured that Chinese merchants overall gained rather than lost ground in Mongolia. Trade expanded and dependency deepened, and the Mongolian economy, once defined by mobility and self-sufficiency, found itself increasingly locked into an economic order that it no longer held the reins of. Yet, by the time the Qing religious fusion project really started hitting

its own stride, the underlying economic structure of the step was already quietly collapsing beneath it. Officially, the Qing still claimed to be preserving the Mongols as a kind of imperial cavalry in waiting. And, at least on paper, they tried to keep Chinese merchants at arm's length, licensing them, restricting their movements, banning them from permanent settlement, marrying, or even spending the night in a Mongolian tent. But in practice, this was little more than theater. The asymmetry was, in fact, structural. Mongols produced in seasonal bursts, but they needed goods year-round. Han traders could extend credit indefinitely. As such, there's little surprise that indebtedness spread across the step like grassfire.

Before long, banner princes, monasteries, and Chinese firms were locked into a single and mutually reinforcing system. High interest loans, mortgaged banners, and tax obligations payable only in ever-shrinking silver bullion. The results equally predictable. The imperial state that once hoped to guard the frontier from merchant encroachment came to depend on those very merchants to fund its Mongolian administration, while the banner's own leaders illegally outsourced tax collection to the same firms that they owed money to. By the 19th century, large swaths of the Mongol people existed less as subjects of their own princes and more as collateral held by Chinese trading houses, even as Han colonists

begin plowing up former pastoralen across the steppe's own rim. Put another way, even as the Qing were working to harmonize Mongol cosmology with their own, the social and economic foundations of that world were dissolving from within. And it is on that happy note that we are going to leave off today. As promised, next time we'll move on to the other two great frontier zones, far far to the west. First, we will traverse to that most remote and inaccessible of Qing possessions, high among the maces and peaks of the Himalayas, Tibet, among the co-ons and chants in the politics

of the true beating heart of the Lamaist world. And then we'll finish up by following the long-fated and half-erased hoofprints of Galdon Khan and the Junggars into what would become the Qing Empire's true money pit, the new frontier, Xinjiang. Until then, thanks for listening. Thank you.