Acknowledgments This book is the end result of a long process that began for me during a graduate seminar taught by K.C. Liu, who suggested to me that a paper on the Panthay Rebellion might be worth my time. Later, after a chance encounter with Dru Gladney, who had just arrived at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, this book began to take shape in my mind. While writing it, I have incurred many debts.
One of the greatest joys of researching a topic as broad as the Panthay Rebellion is that it allowed me to travel across three continents in search of books and archival materials. Especially important were the libraries of Yunnan University, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Washington as well as the Fu Sinian Library at the Academia Sinica. Several archival centers—namely, China’s No. 1 Historical Archive in Beijing, the National Palace Archives in Taipei, and the archives of the Société des missionsétrangères de Paris-all provided essential documents at crucial junctures in my research. I especially thank the staff at each of these institutions for their patience and assistance.
I could not have visited these depositories of history without the financial support of the following: a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship at the University of Hawaii; a China Times Young Scholar Fellowship; a Fulbright-Hays grant; grants from the Pacific Cultural Foundation and the Working Group Modernity and Islam Berlin Seminar; and many smaller grants from Juniata College and Pennsylvania State University.
Some parts of this book have been published in journals and edited volumes. Sections of “Blinkered Visions: Islamic Identity, Hui Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873,” Journal of Asian Studies 62(4)(2003), appear in chapters 3, 6, 8, and 10. Parts of “Trading Places: Resistance, Ethnicity and Governance in Nineteenth-Century Yunnan,” in Robert J. Antony and Jane Kate Leonard, eds., Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs: Qing Crisis Management and the Boundaries of State Power in Late Imperial China (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, no. 114, 2002), appear in chapters 4 and 5. I thank both presses for allowing me to use portions of these articles, and I am grateful for the insights the editors and reviewers offered.
Several people were generous enough to read various incarnations of this book prior to its publication and offered honest and useful comments: xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Leonard Andaya, Ned Davis, John Stephan, Rebecca Weiner, and Jackie Armijo-Hussein, as well as an anonymous reviewer for Stanford University Press. Laura Clark Hull pored over multiple iterations of this book and helped me understand that writing is a process and thereby made the end product far better. Of course, any remaining errors, imperfections, and quirky language are entirely my own.
As with most tasks in my life, other people have nourished me intellectually, emotionally, and physically with thoughtful conversations, shared pitchers of beer, and kind words at decisive moments. All of them helped me greatly while I was writing this book. Here I must acknowledge Peter Worthing, David Sowell, Russ Motter, Anne Hattori, Bill Cummings, Li Donghong, Lin Chaomin, Lu Ren, Joshua Howard, Bill Coleman, Chas McKhann, and Donald P. King. All members of my extended family, on both sides of the Pacific, have helped me by guiding me through rural parts of Yunnan province, by providing a bed during a conference, by offering a key ride to the airport, and so on-I thank them all. One of my greatest resources has been those ties that bind.
Finally, there is that random multitude of cohorts who ushered me through multiple moves, responded to countless e-mails, facilitated last-minute research ventures, and helped me negotiate various crises. I must mention Keith Schoppa, who at various stages tendered his objective judgment and advice; and David Sowell, Elisabeth Allès, and Ingeborg Baldauf, all of whom continue to serve unselfishly as sounding boards for many of the ideas in this book. However, my heaviest debt is to Dru C. Gladney, who served as my advisor throughout this project (long before he officially “gained” that title) and who has been my professional and personal mentor ever since. With grace and generosity, he has seen me through my graduate program and beyond. I hope he finds this book worthy of the field he helped establish.
But my chief companion in the study of Yunnan and the Panthay Rebellion has been Yang Yurong, whom I first met while exploring Yunnan. She has never lost patience or confidence through all of the twists and turns that this journey has taken (even when it has taken me far from her). Without her love, laughter, and support this book would have been a far less enjoyable endeavor and, indeed, a far inferior product. It is fitting, then, that this book is being finished where it all began. . . south of the clouds in Yunnan.
D.G.A.
Kunming, China (Summer 2006)