This is volume III of six in a series on the Sociology of East Asia. Originally published in 1949, Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan.

This book examines how the Ming state transformed the multi-ethnic society of Yunnan into a province. Yunnan had remained outside the ambit of central government when ruled by the Dali kingdom, 937-1253, and its foundation as a province by the Yuan regime in 1276 did not disrupt Dali kingdom style political, social and religious institutions. It was the Ming state in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries through its institutions for military and civilian control which brought about profound changes and truly transformed local society into a province. In contrast to other studies which have portrayed Yunnan as a non-Han frontier region waiting to be colonised, this book, by focusing on changes in local society, casts off the idea of Yunnan as a border area far from civilisation. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Twenty-four of the country's minority groups call Yunnan home, each retaining their own traditions. Stretching from the Himalayan plateau down to the subtropics, Yunnan encompasses extremes from alpine meadows to rainforest. It is the most diverse region in China culturally, biologically, and meteorologically. On a culinary level, this means Yunnan is one of the most delicious places on earth. The region is famous for its mushrooms, hams, pickles, edible flowers, its use of potatoes, and its love of chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Yunnan's food is exciting and unfamiliar, but much of it is actually quite easy to make, using simple techniques already familiar to Western cooks. Each chapter covers a different area featuring its cardinal recipes such as Tibetan momo dumplings, Dai cucumber salad with peanuts, the famed "crossingthe- bridge" noodles of Kunming, Eastern-style fried rice with ham, potatoes, and peas, and roasted eggplant salad from near the Burmese border. Complete with profiles of local cooks, artisans, and farmers, as well as breathtaking on-location photography, Cooking South of the Clouds takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the land of Shangri-La and introduces a new world of flavours.

With comparative frontier history and pioneering use of indigenous sources, Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest. He focuses on the Tai domains of the Yunnan frontier on the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.

A Grammar of Prinmi represents the first in-depth description of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Pǔmǐ Nationality and the Zàng Nationality (in Mùlǐ, Sichuan) in southwest China. Prinmi belongs to the Qiangic branch and is closely related to the extinct language of Tangut. Picus Ding examines in the grammar the phonology (both segmental and suprasegmental), morphology, syntax and information structure of Prinmi, with two sample texts and an English-Prinmi glossary provided in appendices. Some noteworthy features of Prinmi include a wealth of clitics (appearing as proclitic, enclitic, mesoclitic or endoclitic), a lexical tone system akin to Japanese, and a collection of existential verbs that discriminates concreteness, animacy, and location.

Goullart spent nine years in the all-but-forgotten Nakhi Kingdom of southwest China. He had a job entirely suited to his inquiring, gossipy temperament: to get to know the local traders, merchants, inn-keepers and artisans to decide which to back with a loan from the cooperative movement. A Russian by birth, due to his extraordinary skill in language and dialects, Goullart made himself totally at home in Likiang, which had been ruled by Mandarin officials descended from ancient dynasties, was visited by caravans of Tibetan and Burmese traveling merchants, and such mysterious highland peoples as the Lobos. Through this book we are able to travel back to this complex society, which believed simultaneously and sincerely in Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, in addition to their ancient Animism and Shamanism.

This book explores the historical interconnections between Bengal, Burma, and Yunnan (China), and views the corridor as a transregion that exhibits mobility, connectivity and diversity as well as place-based ecogeological uniqueness. With a focus on the concept of corridor geographies that have shared human and environmental histories beyond sharply demarcated territorial sovereignties of modern individual nation-states, it presents the variety and complexity of premodern and modern pathways, corridors, borders, and networks of livelihood-making, local political alliances, trade and commerce, religions, political systems, and colonial encounters. The book discusses crucial themes including environmental edgings of human-nonhuman habitats, transregional migratory routes and habitats of megafauna, elephant corridors in Yunnan–Myanmar–Bengal landscape, framing spaces between India and China, Tibetan–Myanmar corridors, transboundary river systems, narratives of a Rohingya jade trader, cross-border flow of De’ang’s fermented tea, householding in upland Laos, cultural identities, and trans-border livelihoods. Comprehensive and topical, with its wide-ranging case studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of history, routes and border studies, sociology and social anthropology, South East Asian history, South Asian history, Chinese studies, environmental history, human geography, international relations, ecology, and cultural studies.