Amid the Clouds and Mist, a richly detailed account of Yuan, Ming, and early Qing expansion into Guizhou province, is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing field of Chinese frontier studies. It will appeal to readers with a specific interest in the history and ethnography of southwestern China, as well as those with a more general interest in the late imperial period. Solidly grounded in Chinese-language sources, this is probably the first historiographic work in English to utilize materials in the Nasu Yi language of northwestern Guizhou. Apart from the Tai of southeastern Yunnan, the Nasu were the only non-Han residents of southwestern China to leave extensive written records. Like C. Patterson Giersch (Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006]), John E. Herman uses indigenous sources to provide an alternative to the state-centered perspective of imperial authorities and Sinocentric...

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