2025 Theses Doctoral

Constructing Qinghai: Pastoralist Settlement, Monastic Territorialization, and State Incorporation (1724–1935)

Foltz, Cameron Kyle Bender

This dissertation examines how Tibetan political communities settled and territorialized the Blue Lake region (Ch. Qinghai hu; T. Mtsho sngon po; Mong. Kokonor).

Qing frontier policies were unable to manage Tibetan raiding on their vassals, the Khoshud Mongols. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Tibetan polities negotiated rights to the Blue Lake region, while European powers and the US negotiated the Treaties of Tianjin, which opened Tianjin to international trade. As an international wool boom (c. 1880–1930) commenced due to US and British carpet manufacturing, a trade route formed from the Qinghai grasslands to Tianjin.

This boom depended on a colonial prerogative: the treaty pass system. I argue that Tibetan pastoralist communities were enriched through selling their wool enough to build permanent monasteries, which allowed them to territorialize the Blue Lake region. The wool boom then facilitated an unprecedented economic integration of these grasslands with the interior of China during the Republican period. The Ma military rulers in Xining attempted to exert control over their trade. They used pastoral wealth to procure weapons, allowing them to bolster their rule. In 1929, Qinghai Province was formally established, combining the Blue Lake grasslands with Xining, but the administrative infrastructure of the new province existed more on paper than on the ground.