The study of Tibetan state history has taken leaps and bounds over the last twenty years, and with it our understanding of the complex and intertwined histories that linked the Plateau to its imperial neighbor. Few objects in that history have a more contested presence than the Golden Urn, the ritual lottery system deployed in Tibet by the Manchu emperor Qianlong in the late eighteenth century to choose the high incarnate lamas (Tib. tulku) of Tibetan Buddhism. As one of the centerpieces of modern China's claim to sovereignty over Tibet, in modern times the urn was most famously used by the Chinese authorities in 1995 to support their choice of the reincarnation of the Tenth Panchen Lama, a choice hotly contested by the exiled Tibetan administration in Dharamsala.
In such a context, one might expect that Max Oidtmann's Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of...
