"Mongolia: On the Eve of Modernity"

Chair and Moderator: Professor Patricia Berger, History of Art, UC Berkeley

Mongolia is undergoing major changes, and negotiating its place in the contemporary world.  With this in mind, this panel looks back to another moment of emergence prior to the era of Soviet domination, during the empire of the Qing.  What systems, codes, and practices were put in place in this era, and how do these relate to Mongolia’s subsequent development?  Four panelists, two from UC Berkeley and two from Stanford, will present on aspects of Mongolia under the Qing, and explore the implications of their research.

Matthew Mosca, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley: "Placing the Mongols in Qing History: Approaches and Questions"

Lkhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, Visiting Scholar, Stanford University: "Mongols' Origin Myth during the Qing Dynasty: Statehood and Chinggisid Lineage"

Ying Hu, History Department, Stanford University: "The Mongol Code in Practice: A View from Eighteenth-Century Chahar Mongolia."

Uranchimeg Tsultem, History of Art, UC Berkeley: "Text and Image in Later Mongolian Buddhist Art"

Abstracts:

Matthew Mosca, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley: "Placing the Mongols in Qing History: Approaches and Questions" 

This talk will consider the role of the Mongols in Qing history.  It will first review existing scholarship on the relationships of various Mongol political entities with the Qing state, primarily in the context of imperial ideology and strategy.  Other potential areas of research will then be explored, especially interactions between the Mongols and other parts of the Qing Empire in the intellectual, economic and religious spheres.  It will conclude with a consideration of how further research on the Mongols could change our understanding of Qing history.

Lkhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, Visiting Scholar, Stanford University: "Mongols' Origin Myth during the Qing Dynasty: Statehood and Chinggisid Lineage"

From the Qing period sources we learn at least two different discourses of the Mongols’ origin myth: elite and folk. While the elite discourse is best represented in the Mongol chronicles of the period, the folk discourse is revealed by ethnographic inquiry. The two discourses reflect not only two different realities but also two different potentialities and possibilities.

This paper, however, focusing on the elite tradition which was tied to the Chinggisid lineage and the history of the Mongolian statehood, contends that the presence of the Chinggisid ruling lineage and its “imperially sanctioned” intact rule of the Mongols facilitated the imagination of a distinct Mongolia, “a realm within a realm.”   

Ying Hu, History Department, Stanford University: "The Mongol Code in Practice: A View from Eighteenth-Century Chahar Mongolia."

Shortly after the submission of the Eastern Mongols to Manchu rule in 1636, the Mongol Department (later renamed the Lifanyuan) was created expressly to govern Mongol principalities. Thereafter, a set of administrative regulations and a penal code—The Mongol Code— applicable exclusively to Mongolia were promulgated. Based on this legal code, Mongol justice was dispensed by Manchu and Mongol officials. In the early Qing, customary Mongolian law formed the basis of the statutes in the Mongol Code. As the central government revised the code over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the Mongol Code as well as Mongolian legal culture became increasingly influenced by Chinese legal codes and administrative practices. By the end of the dynasty, it became routine practice for administrators in Mongolia to cite Chinese regulations and adopt Sino-Manchu judicial review procedures in the adjudication of Mongol cases. Using court cases from Chahar Mongolia, this paper will examine the Qing legal system in Inner Mongolia in the eighteenth century. I will outline the types of crimes reported to the imperial center, the codes and statutes administrators cited in actual adjudication, and the judicial review process. Legal cases provide a view on how the Qing legal system actually worked in practice in eighteenth century Mongolia.

Uranchimeg Tsultem, History of Art, UC Berkeley: "Text and Image in Later Mongolian Buddhist Art"

Two thangka paintings, the Meditation of the Bogdo Gegeen and the Vajrabhairava Mandala are stored today at the Bogdo Khan Palace Museum in Ulaanbaatar. Patricia Berger and Terese Bartholomew published the Meditation of the Bogdo Gegeen in 1995 in the exhibition catalog The Legacy of Chinggis Khan (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco), where Berger offered a first reading of the extensive imagery. The other painting, Vajrabhairava Mandala has never been published and subsequently has never been studied.

Both paintings are large in size, with a similar composition of a central bloc surrounded by twenty-two smaller scenes--all narratives inscribed in Mongolian--of mainly, but not exclusively, Mongolian reincarnate ruler, Jebzundamba’s empowerments (abhiseka).  Based on the imagery and the inscriptions, Berger has shown that the Meditation of Bogdo Gegeen is not only a story of Jebzundamba’s initiations, but also carries politically-charged messages of the Eighth Jebzundamba (1870-1924), who commissioned the two thangkas.

The Jebzundamba’s pair of the empowerment stories are “visual hagiographies,” to borrow Berger’s term, of not only the Eighth Jebzundamba, but more so of the Jebzundamba lineage. Given the monumentality of the two paintings, the Mongolian language of the inscriptions, and the fact that the deities carry Mongolian appellations, I suggest that both paintings were intended to be publicly seen. What does it mean for a ruler to publicly display his spiritual authority by depicting multiple scenes of his initiations, his Vajradhara-nature, and his devotion to his disciples?
This paper will initiate close reading of lavish inscriptions in Mongolian and Tibetan to discuss whether and how the two thangkas constitute a set. The paper will analyze how the artist creates a visual history of Jebzundamba’s empowerments by showing a clever interplay of multilingual text and complex imagery to convey the ruler’s message to his people and the posterity.