This is a guest post by Dotno Dashdorj Pount. Dr. Pount graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, find more about her here.
In this post, I retell how I came to work on the project PRC Autonomous Region Local Histories: a repository of rare historical materials and give an overview of how to use the database.
Introduction and rationale of the database
Some printed materials are challenging to find by design. For example, materials within the genre of “Cultural and Historical Materials” (Chinese: wenshi ziliao 文史资料; Mongolian: Soyul Teüke-yin Materiyal ᠰᠣᠶᠣᠯ ᠲᠡᠤᠬᠡ ᠊ᠢᠢᠨ ᠮᠠᠲᠡᠷᠢᠶᠠᠯ) are printed in small numbers by governments at various administrative levels in the PRC “for internal circulation,” meaning they were not made available to the public. The “Cultural and Historical Materials” are essentially spin-offs of the local gazetteer of Imperial China, whose usage as a primary source has opened up a whole subfield in Sinology.
This genre of publications constitutes a useful repository of detailed information about almost every locale in the PRC. Most importantly, when the first of these were produced in the 1980s and 90s, it was a moment of thawing in the PRC. Many narratives previously bottled up under the terrors of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) sprang forth through various media since just about everyone was weighed down by the fear that their knowledge, memory, and experience would not survive. A whole genre of “speaking bitterness,” suku 诉苦, literature had flourished around this time, too. This sentiment also affected the minds of the committee members at the many levels of administration: counties and banners, prefectures, and aimags in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. The exact contents of these volumes vary, but they pertain to their localities closely, and often, the individual chapters have separate authors. Some are rather technical descriptions of local geography, economy, and infrastructure; others recount historical and archaeological sites in the region; and some are recollections of people who witnessed or participated in important events. Some even include biographies of notable people in town, and others are devoted to describing the culture, traditions, and accomplishments of an ethnic group (minzu) native to the region. In general, there is little potentially subversive information in these volumes, as they are produced by editorial committees composed of government personnel.
My dissertation adviser, Prof. Chris Atwood, began collecting these while studying in Inner Mongolia in the 1980s. Soon after I began my studies with him, we talked about scanning and uploading them to an online repository so that they would become more widely available. At the time, I was seriously considering continuing and deepening my MA dissertation topic on the modern transnational history of Mongols in Mongolia and China, possibly focusing on land tenure and pastoralism in the IMAR.
Thus, I began my project of uploading the scans of the wenshi ziliao and slowly scanning the printed copies I borrowed from Prof. Atwood. My days were hectic throughout graduate school since my children were still young, so this project had always been on the back burner. I did not know anybody else who might have a different collection of wenshi ziliao, and my goal at the time was to upload only Prof. Atwood’s materials. Recently, I added the scans of Xinjiang materials that Eric Schluessel graciously shared with me. So, my initial ambitions for the website were limited to this genre (hence the domain name “imarlocalhistories.wordpress.com”).
Later, in 2019, while staying in Ulaanbaatar, I searched for the articles I had spotted on the CNKI website, only to realize all Mongolian-language academic journals had vanished from the site. Disappointed, I tried to search in the online catalogs of the libraries in Ulaanbaatar, but found none. At the reading rooms, I was dismayed to confirm that nobody in Mongolian libraries had bothered to collect the Mongolian language, Mongolian-script academic journals published by their southerly colonized brethren, the IMAR (if they had, detecting them was beyond my abilities!). Then, the pandemic closed off the PRC for a longer time than I had left to finish my dissertation, which meant my engagement with the leading group of people who studied the Cult of Chinggis Khan – predominantly an Inner Mongolian affair – was nowhere near adequate.
I managed to visit the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington DC, a handful of times, where an incomplete collection is kept. I managed to scan the tables of contents of printed journals, which I have been uploading to the website a few issues at a time. I intend to eventually make the bibliographic metadata searchable. The process is rather time-consuming, and I do not, unfortunately, have any full-text scans of articles unrelated to my dissertation. (I did, however, apply for some fellowships at the LOC so I could work on this project full-time for a short period and get them done. I hope the gods of LOC fellowships will take mercy on me and grant me one!)
These academic journals are organized separately on the website, but they also complement the collection of periodicals I have been amassing on the website. Once again, from Prof. Atwood’s collection, I scanned newspapers from the winter of 1945-1946 circulating in Inner Mongolia, mainly the “The Morning” (liming 黎明 in Chinese, Örlüge ᠥᠷᠯᠤᠭᠡ in Mongolian) at a time when the Revolution in those parts had not been subsumed under the Chinese Communist Party frameworks. Both Mongolian and Chinese versions were printed at the time, and they capture the moment when young people had high hopes for ushering in a period of freedom and justice.
The modernizing sentiments that appear in the writings of this period, characterized by a search for their peaceful coexistence with the cherished aspects of traditional culture, are features common to the thinkers from former colonies across the world. However, the incarnation of this anti-colonial thinking in Inner Mongolia is particularly poignant since a large section of the Mongolosphere had already become Socialist 1920s, an attractive modernizing and emancipatory movement many Inner Mongolians had hoped to join as soon as the Japanese were defeated. After all, the Soviet-Mongolian army had just marched through the land to chase away the remnants of the Japanese in the autumn of 1945. Yet, the Inner Mongolians had to wave goodbye to this army of “saviors” almost immediately, as the “liberation” of Inner Mongolia had been delegated to the Chinese due to the Yalta Conference in 1945. This eventually resulted in the convoluted arrangement in which the same Chinese people who colonized the Mongolian lands were classified as the subalterns – the oppressed class of peasant tenant-farmers – and were called upon to run the Revolution. The tragic irony in IMAR is that the class of landlords was invariably Mongolian. Since all Mongols owned some livestock and had the customary right to pasture them on commonly held land, the results of class struggle were particularly gruesome. This anti-Mongol repression was compounded later in the Cultural Revolution because of the inconvenient legacy of political regimes and movements under the Japanese and Comintern tutelage in Inner Mongolia, which had embraced Pan-Mongolist and revanchist ideas to varying degrees, spiraling into a genocidal purge against Mongols in the 1960s in the “New Inner Mongolian People’s Party” witch-hunt. Thus, questions of nationalism, class, colonialism, race/ethnicity, and religion intersected in messy ways in this complicated segment of Asia. Yet, because of the decades of censorship henceforth in the PRC, the political history of IMAR does not receive adequate analysis at all, and even primary sources are hard to come by. Therefore, a centralized collection of knowledge produced in a practically decentralized manner like the newspapers mentioned above and local histories, even if they are packaged in a formalized genre, constitutes an essential body of sources for the study of the 20th-century frontier history of China.
The literature produced in Mongolian in the milieu of the De Wang regime (a.k.a. Mengjiang, or Mongolian Autonomous Government) and Manchukuo preserved a pivotal but short-lived moment in Inner Mongolian history when Inner Mongolians did not have to assume a permanent subordination to the PRC. For this reason, the website now has a special section for out-of-print literary works by authors writing before the PRC annexed IMAR. For example, the writings of Sayičungġa are considered classics in Inner Mongolia, and he captures the feelings of hope and frustration of that period. Until recently, his writings were difficult to find, and thus, I have uploaded the novels Homeland of Sand Dunes (1941) and Our Mongolia’s Rising Song (1944). Even if new editions are printed more recently, the text of the old editions is always a vital source to keep, as textual criticism of modern novels elsewhere has repeatedly shown.
As the collection on the site expanded, especially because of the massive amount of wenshi ziliao from Prof. Schluessel, which included Chinese, Uyghur, and Kazakh language publications from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, I changed the page’s title to “PRC Autonomous Region Local Histories,” although the domain retains the initial name. I hope readers with collections of wenshi ziliao, newspapers, scholarly journal collections, and out-of-print, rare novels will consider contacting me and sharing them on this site!
How to use
- The core collection of the “Cultural and Historical Materials” is filed under the “Local History Collections” tab, which is further organized by the autonomous region and the language of the document:
- The “Journal Articles” tab currently contains a single page containing links to PDF scans of the TOC for each issue of the academic journals produced by Inner Mongolian institutions: 1) The Academy of Social Science, and 2) University of Inner Mongolia, and 3) Normal University of Inner Mongolia (not yet complete). At the top of the page, there is a temporary repository of hard-to-find journal articles from other sources, but as more of these are assembled, they will be moved onto their own page.
- The third tab collects scans of newspapers and broadsides. They are further subdivided into separate publications or different language editions. This collection needs more help expanding, as I have already uploaded all that I have so far.
- The fourth tab contains materials produced in the United States about Inner Mongolia in the 20th century. I have not yet engaged deeply with this body of sources, but I hope to incorporate more materials here. Again, any help is welcome!
- The last category on this site contains novels from before or early years of the IMAR. I will expand this collection as I come across out-of-print books.
The Digital Orientalist 