How should one make sense of the vast and complex region—one that encircles parts of China’s southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi as well as parts of present-day Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar—that has long been a crossroads in continental Asia? There are, to be sure, no simple answers. Whatever characteristics the name “Indo-China,” “mainland Southeast Asia,” “Southeast Asian massif,” or “Zomia” draws our attention to, the particular framing inevitably omits or de-emphasizes others. This is not to simply say that such labels or frameworks are inadequate; it is just that no conceptual scaffolding, however rigorous it might be, can (or should) be all-encompassing.

And so it is, I think, for the “Dong World” and China’s “Southwest Silk Road.” For James Anderson, author of a previous monograph on the uprisings (and legacies) of Nong Zhigao/Nùng Trí Cao 儂智高 (ca. 1025–ca. 1055) and co-editor of China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest (Brill, 2015), in which he and the late John Whitmore first set out the parameters for the framing in question, “the Dong 峒/洞 World” is a spatial-cum-political but also temporal label. In spatial/political terms, the Dong World refers to the “network of Tai-speaking polities in the upland valleys (dong) of Southeast Asia and southern China” (3–4); in temporal terms, according to Anderson, one could speak roughly of the “early” (to the tenth century), “middle” (tenth–twelfth centuries), and “late” (eleventh–thirteenth centuries) Dong World eras (30, 81, and 109). Unlike the late James Scott, who in The Art of Not Being Governed (Yale, 2009) emphasizes the “anarchist” aspect of many of the same upland valley dwellers The Dong World and China’s Southwest Silk Road is concerned with, Anderson contends in this new study that the region should be seen as “less a zone of anarchy and more a galaxy…of smaller upland polities orbiting, or avoiding the gravitational pull of, larger lowland states” (5). For Anderson, the “glue” or “force” that held such highland (such as the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms) and lowland (in particular, Tang/Song China and the Lý/Trần Đai Viêt kingdom) regimes together was trade. And he argues that, though less well-known than its northern overland and maritime counterparts, the Southwest Silk Road—“a network of overland passages stretching from central China through the mountainous areas of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan into the eastern states of South Asia” (6–7)—has played a significant role in not only connecting the polities in question but also “knitting the world together” (7, 12).

There is much to admire about Anderson’s new work. In particular, though much has been written about parts of southwest China or upland Southeast Asia at various historical junctures, The Dong World and China’s Southwest Silk Road is able to make use of a wide range of sources (including materials in classical Sinitic and modern Vietnamese) to weave together a narrative that transcends not only geographic/political boundaries but also dynastic divisions. Thus the reader would learn: that the Dong World, through which the Southwest Silk Road passed, had witnessed the flows of people, goods, and religious teachings since the “earliest times” (chapter 1); that, conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the kingdoms of Nanzhao (653–903) and Dali (937–1253), as well as other smaller Dong World polities such as Luodian 羅殿 (ninth–thirteenth centuries) and Ziqi 自杞 (1100–1260), were able to maintain and at times expand their territorial authority through a combination of tribute and trade with the Chinese state (chapter 2); that, given the strategic geography of the lower reaches of the Dong World, the Tai-speaking elite in the region had to concern themselves with the interests and demands of not only the faraway Chinese courts but also the nearby Đai Viêt regimes (chapter 3); that officials posted by the Song court to manage the southwest periphery were confronted with political and economic realities that were seldom reflected in the impressions or stereotypes found in court chronicles (chapter 4); and that the arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the subsequent implementation of the tuguan 土官/tusi 土司 arrangements did significantly alter the power dynamics in the Dong World (chapter 5 and Conclusion).

But as insightful as many of Anderson’s observations and analyses are, a number of areas deserve further reflection. The first has to do with the notion of the Dong World. Given that this is not a label one would find in contemporary sources (the quotation on p. 58 in which “Dong World prefectures” and “Dong World chief” seem to have appeared in a passage in the fifteenth-century Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư [大越史記全書] was probably meant by Anderson as a paraphrase), and given that there are suggestions here and there in the book that one could speak of a regional identity of the Dong World (see, for example, p. 4), it would have been helpful to tease out even more fully the sources of such coherence. For instance, if the Dong World is characterized ecologically as an “upland zone defined by the Tibetan Plateau’s alluvium-rich streams, which flow to the lowland coastal regions of southern China and Mainland Southeast Asia through rugged mountain valleys” (1), how had this particular ecological characteristic of the region come to foster a sense of identity for this “world”? Likewise, if the Dong World was in part defined by a network of Tai-speaking polities, as Anderson argues, how had its linguistic complexity (as Tai, obviously, is not a single language) come to condition the coherence of the region? I think there are good answers out there (and trade-related ones are reasonable places to start); the point here is that it would be helpful to pay more attention to what constituted the “world” of the Dong World.

The second area has to do with the Southwest Silk Road. I understand “silk roads” are seldom about silk or any specific road, and I appreciate that the use of the label is to highlight the flows of people, goods, and ideas across multiple zones. So while I am sympathetic to the use of “Southwest Silk Road” to emphasize such movements within (and through) the region under discussion, its deployment would have been more persuasive with more evidence of how such flows “played a key role in knitting the world together” (12).

The third and final area has to do with the indigenous population in the region. This is not the place to engage in a detailed discussion on how to reconstruct the ethnicity and agency of indigenous peoples in premodern times. But while Anderson is no doubt aware of the literature (among others, he cites as an inspiration Richard White’s The Middle Ground [Cambridge, 1991]), the book would be more compelling if the challenges associated with such an endeavor were more explicitly addressed. As it stands, The Dong World and China’s Southwest Silk Road draws on a wide range of secondary sources (including Nguyễn Chí Buyên, Hoàng Hoa Toàn, and Lương Văn Bảo, eds., Nguồn Gôc Lịch Sử Tộc Người Vùng Biên Giới Phia Bắc Việt Nam [History of the origins of ethnic groups of northern Vietnam’s border areas] [Hanoi, 2000]) to help reconstruct the ethnic landscape of the region. But the analyses would be more satisfying if Anderson had gone one step further in explaining how we know what we know (and how we know what we don’t know).

This is a book that deserves to be read by anyone interested in that part of the Asian continent. Whether one refers to it as the Southeast Asian massif, Zomia, or the Dong World, the book has succeeded in “restoring [the region]…to the center of the narrative” (3). For historians of China, especially those interested in its peripheries, what this admirable study reinforces is the understanding that research should not be confined by present-day national boundaries. And we should thank James Anderson for this important reminder.