This book is a PhD dissertation in Sinology submitted to the Freie Universität zu Berlin in 2011. It focuses on the social and economic history of Dunhuang/Shazhou in the context of the Tibetan Empire's occupation of this Chinese city from c.787 to 848, and in relation to the Tang period that preceded it and the Guiyijun period that followed. Drawing largely on Dunhuang documents, both in Tibetan and Chinese, Taenzer primarily addresses problems relevant to the subfields of early Tibetan studies and Dunhuang studies.

The book is divided into three unequal parts. Part one (pp. 9–109) is a survey of the administrative system of the Tibetan Empire (c.605–866 CE), particularly as reflected in Dunhuang documents. Part two (pp. 110–206) focuses on demographics and population in Dunhuang and the surrounding area. Part three (pp. 207–405) concerns economy and taxation, and investigates loan, sale, and hire contracts. Part three's length is largely due to the fact that it includes two “text sections,” where Taenzer provides transliterations, translations, and commentaries on Tibetan and Chinese texts relating to taxation and contracts, respectively.

On the whole, the work is a massive achievement, and bears witness to years of concerted research surveying a massive body of primary sources in Tibetan and Chinese. Taenzer's survey of Tibetan documents not only from Dunhuang, but also from Mīrān, Mazār Tāgh, and Turfan is very impressive, and to be applauded. To highlight a few of the book's strengths, it includes a long discussion of the chronology of the Tibetan redistricting and reorganization of land and people in and around Dunhuang, and a thorough attempt to date the relevant Tibetan documents (pp. 50–78). There are discussions of the types of cereals farmed in Dunhuang (pp. 207–10), their average yields, levels of subsistence, and the rates of taxation relevant to yields (pp. 88–90, 340–43). We also learn about the demographics of Dunhuang in terms of raw population numbers, the increasing numbers of monks and nuns over time, and the meager number of Tibetan households during Tibetan occupation (pp. 194–202). Taenzer emphasizes that under Tibetan rule, unlike the Tang, no interest was charged on loans apart from the standard practice that a loan be doubled if be paid late (pp. 336–37). In her conclusions, Taenzer argues that the system of Tibetan administration differed significantly from the Tang, and cannot be seen as a derivative of it. Like the other discussions in the book, and its introduction, the conclusion is brief, and does not benefit from a fluid contextualization that guides the reader through an argument and towards a logical conclusion. In this book chock-full of details, the strengths tend to be small observations.

Partly due to its surveying such a large body of data, there are places where the book is disjointed, in relation to both its various parts and previous scholarship. Symptoms of the former are an excess of footnotes that redirect one to the book's other chapters, and inconsistencies in names and dates, for example, Ral-pa-chan [sic] reigns “817–841” (p. 23, n.35) and “815–838” (p. 205). Taenzer's use (or lack of use) of previous scholarship is more problematic. The book draws on contemporary Chinese, Japanese, German, English, and French scholarship, but neglects modern Tibetan works.

More problematic is Taenzer's approach to scholarship that has directly addressed the documents and the themes with which she deals. Taenzer sometimes cites these where appropriate, but other times does not. The book's chapters overlap most closely with the works of Kazushi Iwao and Tsuguhito Takeuchi, but rarely does Taenzer allow space to discuss significant differences of opinion. In the case of Iwao's interpretation of a key term, rkya, for example, to which he devoted an article and to which Taenzer dedicates a subchapter (pp. 402–5), her comparative silence regarding Iwao's conflicting interpretation is either myopic or disingenuous. Odd, also, is her citation of Takeuchi in support of her mistaken assertion that lho bal, roughly the Tibetan equivalent of Chinese “barbarian” (e.g., rong yi 戎夷, si yi 四夷, man mao 蠻貌) applies to unspecified ethnicities, for example, neither Tibetan, Chinese, nor Tuyuhun, etc. (pp. 45; 67; 94, n.66). Takeuchi, like nearly all other scholars, in fact argued that the term refers to non-Tibetan “barbarians” more generally, a category that included Chinese. Such misapprehension or misuse of others' work occurs elsewhere, but more numerous are those instances where previous scholarship is simply ignored. Rather than evidence of meanness, this is probably due to a myopic focus on primary texts and their relationships to one another—the font of the book's strengths.

Despite such shortcomings, this work and its numerous contributions should not be dismissed. Taenzer has highlighted several documents and brought forth many facts that enhance the fields of Dunhuang studies and early Tibetan studies.