Wolves by Jeon Sungtae (author) and Sora Kim-Russell (translator); paperback; $11 (White Pine Press, 2017)

On the basis of a blog review by Charles Montgomery, a former English teacher in Seoul, this book will be of special interest to those interested in a fictional reflection on the growing connections between Mongolia and South Korea.  Six of the ten short stories in Wolves take place in Mongolia itself, involving "sad and lonely" characters from Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea and elsewhere who often "are trying to escape their circumstances or rediscover themselves".

The very first story takes its name from a Korean restaurant in Ulaanbaatar operated to earn hard currency for North Korea, in turn becoming a platform for critical reflections on Mongolia's shift from communism to a market economy. The title story "Wolves" revolves around similar reflections, in this case told in part by a Mongolian who voices deep skepticism about both Korean tourists and the lure of money which draws him to them.

According to Montgomery,  "Jeon is very good at interweaving the elements of his stories to create a larger context. . . (he) creates very particular characters and events and places them in a mosaic they are incapable of seeing".

Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society, edited by Verna A. Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016);  xxii + 325 pp. $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-995864-1; $36.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-995866-5

H-Net recentlly posted a review of this book by Erdenchuluu Khochahar (University of Tokyo), describing it a an "innovative and progressive work" and noting that it provides a usesful reflection on how Buddhism has adapted to Mongolian indigenous culture and society, in turn developing into a unique “Mongolian Buddhism” and Mongolian Buddhist identity:

"This book contains fifteen individual articles that focus on three major topics. The first group of articles addresses the religious and political activities of Mongolian Buddhist personages of the prerevolutionary period. This includes chapters 1 to 5, by (respectively) Johan Elverskog, Richard Taupier, Baatr Kitinov, Matthew King, and Vesna A. Wallace, on what happened to Queen Jӧnggen; the western Mongolian Clear Script and the making of a Buddhist state; the last attempt to build the Buddhist state; modernities, sense making, and the inscription of Mongolian Buddhist place; and envisioning a Mongolian Buddhist identity through Chinggis Khan.

"The second set of articles addresses strategies used to indigenize and popularize Buddhism in Mongolian society through religious, cultural, and artistic practices. This section features work by Uranchimeg B. Ujeed, Uranchimeg Tsultemin (chapters 7 and 8), Simon Wickham-Smith, and Vesna A. Wallace (chapters 10 to 12) on the establishment of the Mergen tradition of Mongolian Buddhism; Vajrayāna and the state in medieval Mongolia; the power and authority of Maitreya in Mongolia; a literary history of Buddhism in Mongolia; how Vajrapāṇi became a Mongol; commonalities among protective deities, Mongolian heroes, and swift steeds; and Buddhist sacred mountains, auspicious landscapes, and their agency. 

Finally, three articles cover the persecution and revitalization of Buddhism in modern Mongolian societies. These include Christopher Kaplonski, Karma Lekshe Tsomo, and Hürelbaatar Ujeed, on court cases against Buddhist monks in early socialist Mongolia; Buddhist women of Buryatia; and the social and cultural practice of Buddhism in the local context of Inner Mongolia in the first half of the twentieth century".

Genocide on the Mongolian Steppe: First-Hand Accounts of Genocide in Southern Mongolia During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Volume I Paperback – published on October 30, 2017; available on Amazon for $19.49) by Enghebatu Togochog (Translator), Yang Haiying (Author)
 

(Note:  This is an English translation of the book documenting the history of the persecution of Mongols in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution; it is already available in Japanese and German).

Professor Yang Haiying of Shizuoka University received the Shiba Ryotara Award upon publication of this book in Japanese several years ago. According to an article in the Japanese newspaper Iwanami Shoten at the time, Professor Haiying was "shocked speechless by hearing about the cruelties, I could not hold back my tears during the interviews with the victims".

Born in Ordos in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Yang Haiying came to study in Japan in March 1989, inspired by Tadao Umesao, founding head of the National Museum of Ethnology (1920-2010). Married to a Japanese woman, he obtained Japanese citizenship in 2000. Employed by Shizuoka University as a professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science since 2004, his research has focused on Mongolian ethnology.

Vividly describing the ethnic cleansing and forcible displacement of the Mongolian people based on testimonials and other materials, Genocide on the Mongolian Steppe is described in Iwanami Shoten as a "masterpiece in two volumes," taking the author 18 years to research and write. The effort included collecting a large number of official Chinese documents and interviewing more than 100 eyewitnesses.

Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet: Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English by Li Dechun (李得春, Limusishiden) and Gerald Roche

Available as an Open Access publication (www.openbookpublishers.com), Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet: Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and Englishcontains ballads of martial heroism, tales of tragic lovers and visions of the nature of the world, providing a rich repository of songs collected among the Mongghul of the Seven Valleys, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau in western China. These songs represent the apogee of Mongghul oral literature, providing valuable insights into the lives of Mongghul people—their hopes, dreams, and worries. They bear testimony to the impressive plurilingual repertoire commanded by some Mongghul singers: the original texts in Tibetan, Mongghul, and Chinese are here presented in Mongghul, Chinese, and English.

The kaleidoscope of stories told in these songs include that of Marshall Qi, a chieftain from the Seven Valleys who travels to Luoyang with his Mongghul army to battle rebels; Laarimbu and Qiimunso, a pair of star-crossed lovers who take revenge from beyond the grave on the families that kept them apart; and the Crop-Planting Song and the Sheep Song, which map the physical and spiritual terrain of the Mongghul people, vividly describing the physical and cosmological world in which they exist.

This collection of songs is supported by an Introduction by Gerald Roche that provides an understanding of their traditional context, and shows that these works offer insights into the practices of multilingualism in Tibet. Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast
Tibet is vital reading for researchers and others working on oral literature, as well as those who study Inner Asia, Tibet, and China’s ethnic minorities. Finally, this book is of interest to linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists, particularly those working on small-scale multilingualism and pre-colonial multilingualism.

Among Herders of Mongolia by Christel Braae (2017 National Museum of Denmark).  This is a study of a unique collection of INner Mongolian artifacts that are part of the Haslund-Christensen Collection at the National Museum of Denmark.  They are analyzed and visually presented in a ctalogue of more than 800 items, documenting daily life in a pastoral society.

Dark Heavens: Shamans and Hunters in Mongolia by Hamid Sardar (2016 Iranian-born anthropologist Hamid Sardar has been photographing different aspects of rural Mongolia since 2000, immersing himself in daily life and capturig on film the daily rituals, hunting expeditions and spiritual practices of countryside.  Mixing color and black-and-white images, this book showcases Mongolian shamans and hunters, reflecting their relationship with land and animals.  Along with the visual images, this book also includes an informative text that provides additional details and information that will be of special interests to anthropologists and photographers, regardless of whether they have visited Mongolia or not.

Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan by Bettine Birge (2017 Harvard University Press). The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century and Khubilai Khan’s founding of the Yuan dynasty brought together under one government people of different languages, religions, and social customs. Chinese law evolved rapidly to accommodate these changes, as reflected in the great compendium Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty). The records of legal cases contained in this seminal text, Bettine Birge shows, paint a portrait of medieval Chinese family life—and the conflicts that arose from it—that is unmatched by any other historical source. Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory inner workings of the Mongol-Yuan legal system, seen through the prism of marriage disputes in chapter eighteen of the Yuan dianzhang, which has never before been translated into another language. Birge’s meticulously annotated translation clarifies the meaning of terms and passages, some in a hybrid Sino-Mongolian language, for specialists and general readers alike. The text includes court testimony—recorded in the vivid vernacular of people from all social classes—in lawsuits over adultery, divorce, rape, wife-selling, marriages of runaway slaves, and other conflicts. It brings us closer than any other source to the actual Mongolian speech of Khubilai and the great khans who succeeded him as they struggled to reconcile very different Mongol, Muslim, and Chinese legal traditions and confront the challenges of ruling a diverse polyethnic empire.

How Mongolia Matters: War, Law, and Society, edited by Morris Rossabi (2017 Brill). The essays in this volume dispel some of the myths concerning the Mongolians and other Inner Asian peoples. This remarkable volume edited by and dedicated to Morris Rossabi challenges the depictions of these mostly nomadic pastoral groups as barbaric plunderers and killers while not denying the destruction and loss of life they engendered. Several essays pioneer in consulting Mongolian and other Inner Asian rather than exclusively Chinese and Persian sources, offering new and different perspectives. Such research reveals the divisions among the Mongolians, which weakened them and led to the collapse of their Empire. Two essays dispel myths about modern Mongolia and reveal the country’s significance, even in an era of superpowers, two of which surround it. Contributors are: Christopher Atwood, Bettine Birge, Michael Brose, Pamela Crossley, Johan Elverskog, Jargalsaikhan Enkhsaikhan, Yuki Konagaya, James Millward, David Morgan, and David Robinson.

A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the National Fringes of Qing Rule by Jonathan Schlesinger (2017 Stanford University Press). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources. In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature.

L’appel du bonheur: Le partage alimentaire mongol [The call for happiness. Mongolian food sharing] by Sandrine Ruhlmann (2015 Centre d’Études Mongoles & Sibériennes Nord-Asie 5). For Mongolian people, sharing food goes far beyond merely feeding. By a set of “opening” and “closing”, for everyday life or for special events, in the family circle or with visitors, the fact of sharing food ensures the good order of social relationships. It ensures also the good order of seasonal rhythm and of human life cycle. It therefore attracts happiness to humans and their herds. Between 2000 and 2015, Sandrine Ruhlmann lived long months in the Mongolian steppe and in the city. She describes and analyses in detail the existing food system. She recognizes in this latter intermingled ideas and values inherited from Shamanism, Buddhism, and from Communist ideology. Through the meat on bone, the fermented milk, the ravioli, or the odd soleshoe-shaped pastries a way of thinking and of living is revealed. (Published in French)

Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier by David Brophy (Harvard University Press, April 2016). The meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in the nineteenth century had dramatic consequences for Central Asia’s Muslim communities. Along this frontier, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and the revolutions that engulfed Russia and China in the early twentieth century. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the modern Uyghur nation. As exiles and émigrés, traders and seasonal laborers, a diverse diaspora of Muslims from China’s northwest province of Xinjiang spread to Russian territory, where they became enmeshed in political and intellectual currents among Russia’s Muslims. From the many national and transnational discourses of identity that circulated in this mixed community, the rhetoric of Uyghur nationhood emerged as a rallying point in the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. Working both with and against Soviet policy, a shifting alliance of constituencies invoked the idea of a Uyghur nation to secure a place for itself in Soviet Central Asia and to spread the revolution to Xinjiang. Although its existence was contested in the fractious politics of the 1920s, in the 1930s the Uyghur nation achieved official recognition in the Soviet Union and China. Grounded in a wealth of little-known archives from across Eurasia, Uyghur Nation offers a bottom-up perspective on nation-building in the Soviet Union and China and provides crucial background to the ongoing contest for the history and identity of Xinjiang.

China's Early Mosques by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt (Edinburgh University Press, Jan. 2016). What happens when a monotheistic, foreign religion needs a space in which to worship in China, a civilisation with a building tradition that has been largely unchanged for several millennia? The story of this extraordinary convergence begins in the 7th century and continues under the Chinese rule of Song and Ming, and the non-Chinese rule of the Mongols and Manchus, each with a different political and religious agenda. The author shows that mosques, and ultimately Islam, have survived in China because the Chinese architectural system, though often unchanging, is adaptable: it can accommodate the religious requirements of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Islam.

The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century by Igor de Rachewiltz. Shorter version edited by John C. Street, University of Wisconsin―Madison. Electronic book freely available as part of Western Washington University’s Contributing to Education through Digital Access to Research (CEDAR) portal at http://cedar.wwu.edu/cedarbooks/4