Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China's Borderlands, 1919-45

How early-twentieth-century fieldwork put the Sino-Tibetan borderlands at the center of China’s nation-making process. The center may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, students, and missionaries who took to the field on China’s southwestern border at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China’s claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed la...