Winner of the 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award This book is the first long-term study of the Sino-Tibetan borderland. It traces relationships and mutual influence among Tibetans, Chinese, Hui Muslims, Qiang and others over some 600 years, focusing on the old Chinese garrison city of Songpan and the nearby religious center of Huanglong, or Yellow Dragon. Combining historical research and fieldwork, Xiaofei Kang and Donald Sutton examine the cultural politics of northern Sichuan from early Ming through Communist revolution to the age of global tourism, bringing to light creative local adaptations in culture, ethnicity and religion as successive regimes in Beijing struggle to control and transform this distant frontier.

Erun Oncant, the ordinary son of ordinary parents, lived in Cardoney. That is, until chosen by a dying dragon to be the rider for her unhatched daughter. As he took the sword from her dying body, it became instilled with magical powers, and all that remained of her flowed into it. The egg hatched into the first ever yellow dragon, a colour never seen before and only talked about in legend, and with the help of Princess Lelia from the Kingdom of Vanticor, he cared for her, as she grew to full size. Her name, inherited from her mother, became Corella. Tensions between surrounding Kingdoms had developed into all out war under the influence of a wizard of immense power. All feared that Cardoney would be next. Erun and Corella forged an inseparable bond, and together, they set out to foil the evil machinations of the wizard and restore peace to the world.