In the early decades of the Ming Dynasty, on what is now a vegetable patch on the western hill of the Songpan county seat, the Monastery of Great Compassion became the home of a Han Chinese Chan Buddhist monk appointed by the state to oversee local Bon and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. This religious intermediary was expected to convert northern Sichuan's Tibetans into obedient subjects of the Ming state. Even with his temporary success, aided by the established military garrison and the enrollment of local leaders in the state's tusi system, the ability of the Ming to bring the region under its control was fleeting at best. By the mid-Qing Dynasty this indirect state rule would collapse, and the region known in Tibetan as the Shar khog would return to autonomous rule by local tsowa (Ch. buluo).

Nearly 600 years later, in a meadow behind the Daoist-managed Rear Temple in the Huanglong scenic area, a stone marks the grave of the temple's last priest, who committed suicide during the political campaigns of the Mao era, his body found seated in a self-dug grave facing the temple door. This period would also rend the fabric of local Tibetan social, political and religious life, especially through the “Democratic Reform” campaign of 1958. Today, it is clear that the People's Republic has succeeded in Songpan where all state projects before it had failed, establishing an unprecedented governing infrastructure and an economy of capital accumulation.

These sites and stories (respectively, pp. 43–44 and pp. 364–373) bookend Kang and Sutton's ambitious, longue durée history of how the central Chinese state sought to impose “its political will and ideology on the frontier,” and how “frontier cultures and identities” adapted to the state project (p. 311). This is a substantial, sprawling book, covering multiple sites, multiple ethnic populations and multiple themes spread across a 600-year time span: Historically, the book begins with the establishment of the remote military garrison at Songpan in the Ming Dynasty (chapter one). It follows the ebb and flow of state assertiveness in the region from the expansion and overextension of the Qing dynasty (chapter two), through the period of political fragmentation and social change in the Republican period (chapter three), to the consequential changes brought by the Party state in the Mao era, which would put an end to Tibetan autonomy (chapter five).

In addition to its primary focus on the Chinese state, the book explains how the sacred geography of nearby Huanglong was shared by Bon, Tibetan Buddhist, Chinese Buddhist, Daoist and folk practitioners long before the Mao era (chapter four). It explains how, in the reform era, the state's efforts to regulate religion has spurred both local resistance and opportunism (chapter eight), and how local ethnoreligious identity thwarts state classification, sustains a shared regional identity, and reinforces contests over sacred space (chapter nine). Finally, the book covers the rise of tourism in Huanglong, both the contradictions that emerged with its designation as a natural heritage site (chapter six) and the utility of ethnicity and religion to a local “tourism culture,” which can selectively aggrandize or silence Tibetan religious and cultural practices (chapter seven).

Ordered roughly chronologically, these chapters require a close reading to follow the threads of ethnicity, religion and tourism. Keeping the ultimate concern with the state in mind is helpful, especially as the final chapter serves more as a summary of the preceding discussion than a synthesizing conclusion. Of the many historical findings presented here, one of the most broadly notable is that while there were periods of violence (from both sides) and brutality (particularly from the Chinese state in the 1950s), Greater Songpan was marked by long periods of interethnic accommodation and peace, long enough for a regional identity to form, manifested in a shared local dialect, native place identification, and borrowed cultural and religious practices (pp. 400–402).

This thread of local agency also runs through Jack Patrick Hayes's A Change in Worlds on the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands (2014, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD), which covers the same area, over much of the same period, but is focused more on the sources of local conflict than the complexities of how that conflict was managed. In focusing on religion, Kang and Sutton present a more historically nuanced account of interethnic relations and Chinese state governing strategy than Hayes, while Hayes provides a useful account of the politics of land use and resource management.

In addition to valuable historical detail from their archival work and observations from site visits, Kang and Sutton include maps of the area's sacred geography, major Chinese garrisons and Tibetan tsowa. An extensive appendix catalogues the area's religious sites and annual events. Contesting the Yellow Dragon is a richly detailed work of borderland history that should find a core readership among historians of China, Tibet, interethnic relations and borderland studies. With its attention to more contemporary events (to about 2007), it should also find many readers among anthropologists, geographers, sociologists and others interested in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands of today, from the machinations of the Chinese state, to the livelihoods of Shar khog Tibetans and the pervasiveness of tourists and tourism in Songpan.