This book is a collection of essays on the histories of the Yuan and Qing dynasties by Prof. Shen Weirong, a leading Chinese Tibetologist and advocate for Sino-Tibetan Buddhist studies. The book contains five articles based around the products of Prof. Shen's recent research on Tibetan history and Tibetan Buddhism in the Yuan and Qing dynasties. It addresses the foremost international scholarly debate on how to properly interpret the histories of non-Han-Chinese ruling dynasties, and assesses prior scholarship on the topic from the perspective of a Central Asian and Buddhist philologist. Via philological inquiry into a variety of multilingual documents, including Tibetan, Mongolian, Tangut, and Manchu texts, the author re-examines the religious and political relations between Tibet and the Chinese central government during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties within the framework of a broader contemporary scholarship between the East and West.

Shen Weirong is Professor of Tibetan Studies at Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study for Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Humanities, Tsinghua University. As a scholar in Central Asian philology, he was awarded as Changjiang Scholar for his leading role in the studies of historical languages and culture of Western regions in China. His research focuses on Tibetan histories as well as Sino-Tibetan Buddhist studies. He has published numerous books and articles in Chinese, English, German and Japanese, including monograms Leben und historische Bedeutung des ersten Dalai Lama bdGe ’dun grub pa dpal bzang po (1391-1474) (St. Augustin, Germany: Styler Verlag, Institut Monometa Serica, 2002), Philological Studies of Tibetan History and Buddhism (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 2010), Imaging Tibet: A Cross Cultural Study on Monks, Living Buddhas, Lamas and Esoteric Buddhism (Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press, 2015), Tibetan Buddhism in Central Eurasia and China Proper: Studies on Dacheng yaodao miji (Beijing: Beijing Normal University, 2017), Text and History: The Making of Tibetan Buddhist Historical Narratives and the Construction of Sino-Tibetan Buddhist Studies (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2016) and The Return to Philology (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 2019).