As a discipline, Tibetan studies rarely does itself favors when it comes to publishing. Specialist language, irregular transcriptions of Tibetan terms, parochial concerns, and a proclivity for burying its best research in obscure Festschriften have made it difficult for outsiders and scholars in neighboring fields to follow the action. Peter Schwieger's The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China, however, does Tibetan studies a great service, synthesizing several decades of scholarship and Schwieger's own observations from archival research into a coherent historical narrative that demonstrates how Tibet's unique political tradition came to influence neighboring societies and how those polities—Mongol confederations and successive China-based empires—in turn influenced Tibet's political culture.

For over forty years, those looking for an English-language account of Tibetan history between 1500 and 1800—the period that saw the unification of Tibet under the government of the Ganden Podrang government of the Dalai Lamas and the near monopolization of the religious landscape by the Geluk order—have been well served by Zahiruddin Ahmad's Sino-Tibetan Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1970) and Luciano Petech's China and Tibet in the Early XVIIIth Century: History of the Establishment of Chinese Protectorate in Tibet (Leiden: Brill, 1972). However, both authors admitted the limitations of scholarship based primarily on the Qing Veritable Records or Tibetan-language chronicles of the Dalai and Panchen lamas and their inner circle of advisors—sources that expose the ambitions of rulers, but rarely the deliberations, inner conflicts, or uncomfortable compromises that constituted the daily grind of governance. In contrast, Schwieger has been able to take advantage of the publication of Tibet-related historical documents in the PRC and an unprecedented period of access to archives of the Tibet Autonomous Region from 1998 to 2000. During this brief moment of international cooperation, a German-funded team led by Schwieger, together with local archivists, was able to make digital copies of 2,700 documents dating from the thirteenth to twentieth centuries and originally held by Kündeling Monastery. Located in Lhasa, this monastery had been established by the Qing court in the 1790s and served as the home base of the Tatsak Rinpochés, a reincarnate lineage of lamas who, as regents to the Dalai Lamas, repeatedly administered the government of Tibet during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The result is a book that measures the normative claims of Tibetan elites and foreign powers against an array of contemporaneous legal documents. In particular, Schwieger's research sheds light on the shifting configurations of power that have previously been obscured by the mutual agreement of Inner Asian elites to pursue “Buddhist government” and “preceptor-donor” (colloquially, “patron-priest”) relations with the Geluk school. What emerges is a deeply historicized account in which the durability of temporal administration by incarnate lamas in Lhasa and at the local level is portrayed not as the inevitable outcome of indigenous political culture, but rather as the contingent result of significant and ongoing interventions by outside powers, most importantly Qing emperors from the early 1700s to the early 1800s. Diplomatic niceties aside, working out the balance of power between esteemed lamas and lay rulers turns out to have been a highly fraught endeavor. Schwieger finds that for the lifetime of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82), archival documents largely bear out the claims of the Dalai Lama and his retainers that, following the establishment of preceptor-donor relations with Gushri Khan and the latter's successful intervention in the Tibetan civil war on behalf of the Geluk school between 1636 and 1642, the Dalai Lama ruled as paramount authority in Tibet. The idea of the Dalai Lama as a political ruler, however, proved more resilient than the untrammeled exercise of such power. After the government of the Sixth Dalai Lama collapsed under the weight of suspicions about his authenticity in 1706, future Dalai Lama–headed governments would only be revived under the supervision of Qing rulers, who saw advantage in preserving the notion of Buddhist government and preferred a strong central government in Lhasa.

The book is at its most original and nuanced when it steps away from the emperor and the Dalai Lama and examines the records of the Kündeling regents. It is in these documents that the influence Qing rulers and their local representatives, the ambans, could wield over local politics and especially the selection and cultivation of regents becomes apparent. We learn, for instance, of Qing involvement in the search for the reincarnation of the future Kündeling regent in 1778 (p. 162) and the distribution of estates in central Tibet to the regent in 1792 as a reward for services rendered to the emperor (p. 182).

Schwieger's thorough analysis and full translations of these and many other archival documents will make The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China an essential resource for specialists and students of Tibetan history for the foreseeable future. At the end of the book, Schwieger makes the compelling yet controversial assertion that the existence of a strong central Tibetan government organized around the Dalai Lama in the early twentieth century was as much a result of Qing policy as it was the efforts of Gelukpa “empire builders” (pp. 220–21). This hypothesis requires further substantiation than is available in a book that ends its narrative in the early 1800s and has focused its analysis on the official correspondence of a select group of Geluk prelates and high Qing officials. Yet by illuminating the deep connections between Tibetan elites and the Qing state during the eighteenth century, Schwieger has set the agenda for future scholars, who must now not only take the Pax Manjurica seriously, but also figure out what it meant for Tibetan society in the nineteenth century.