The Tributary System in China's Historical Imagination: China and Hunza, ca. 1760–1960

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines over 200 years (1761–1963) of China's relations with the Central Asian tribal state of Hunza. Employing a territorial genealogical approach, this research explores how Hunza, not initially recognised during the high Qing as an inner dependency or vassal, was gradually re-conceptualised by the Qing court as a historical tributary protectorate, and then in the Republican and Nationalist eras became known as a ‘lost territory’ ripe for restoration. It will also argue that the tributary system is not a dynastic legacy that ceased to function after 1911; but rather, it was an instrument of political expediency that continued to be used in the post-imperial era. In a sense, this research offers a new thinking about the ‘tribute system’ which might really be a nineteenth and twentieth century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate relations (common in one form or another throughout many parts of Asia); this reinterpretation was strongly informed by English-language terminology and formulations, including ‘suzerainty’ and the mistranslation of ‘gong’ as ‘tribute’ itself, and both Britain and China manipulated the terminology and claimed to further their respective territorial, diplomatic and strategic interests.