In 1995, officials of the Chinese Communist Party gathered at the holiest temple of Tibetan Buddhism, the Jokhang, to officiate an elaborate ceremony that had not been held since the waning days of the Qing Empire. The purpose was clear, to ensure that Party leaders rather than the exiled Dalai Lama controlled the process by which the reincarnation of the Tenth Panchen Lama would be chosen, and, by extension, future rebirths of prominent Tibetan Buddhist hierarchs, including the Dalai Lama himself. In his meticulously researched and skillfully argued book, Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann has produced the first detailed study of the genesis, execution, and impact of the Golden Urn ritual, a 1790s invention of the aging Qianlong Emperor and his high officials and surrogates based on a “Chinese bureaucratic tradition” for appointing officials during the mid-Ming dynasty (6). He has also contributed important new insights on the operations of the late-Qianlong court, notions of Qing sovereignty and governance over Inner Asia—what he controversially refers to as “Qing colonialism”—and the systemization of the authority of the Geluk order of Tibetan Buddhism and its intersection with Qing imperial power during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

Drawing on a range of sources in Chinese, Manchu, Tibetan, and Mongolian, Forging the Gold Urn at its heart is a legal-administrative history. Organized around the themes of “sovereignty,” “faith,” and “law,” and divided chronologically into three “acts,” Oidtmann's story spans much of the Qing's Inner Asian empire—from Beijing to Lhasa, Amdo to Outer Mongolia—and is populated by some of its most prominent figures—including the notorious Grand Secretary Hešen and his brother Heliyen, the great Manchu generals and statesmen Fuk'anggan and Agūi, a host of prominent lamas such as the Eighth Dalai Lama, the Third Tukwan kūtuktu, and the Second Belmang Pandita, and members of Inner Asia's secular nobility. Noticeably absent are more than a couple of prominent Han Chinese actors, emphasizing the degree to which the administration of Qing Inner Asia was, to this point, left largely to those of Inner Asian origins and underscoring the necessity of consulting sources in languages other than Chinese. For instance, by employing Manchu-language court records Oidtmann demonstrates that the Qianlong Emperor's 1792 Chinese-language edict, Lama Shuo (Discourse on Lamas), which had been considered his definitive statement, “provided neither the last word on how the Golden Urn was to be used nor any indication of the additional measures the dynasty would ultimately resort to in order to implement the new policy” (18). This conceptual and linguistic reorientation places Forging the Golden Urn squarely within the historiographic lineage of what has become known as “New Qing History.” Yet more than many of his New Qing predecessors, Oidtmann also shows that the lines separating the Qing's Chinese and Inner Asian possessions were permeable, primarily through the lived experiences of several of the book's main protagonists, who, for instance, had fought in the Jinchuan Wars, commanded troops against Taiwanese and White Lotus rebels, or adjudicated the “Soulstealers” case described previously by Philip Khun.Footnote ¹ These transimperial actors could not help but transfer their experiences from one part of the empire to another. Chief among them was the octogenarian emperor himself, who in Oidtmann's reading comes off as an active and energetic, if narcissistic and perhaps paranoid, ruler.

Act 1 follows the debates at court and in Lhasa that led to the invention of the Golden Urn ritual. Following the Qing victory in the second Gurkha war (1791), the Qianlong Emperor became convinced that the underlying source of the conflict had been the “moral collapse of the Tibetan ecclesiastic elite” (61). According to Oidtmann, the emperor was particularly intent on disrupting “the practice of seeking final confirmation [of reincarnate lamas] by soliciting prophecies from the oracles” (72), “a concern that culminated in the argument that the practical exercise of Qing authority over all matters Tibetan required as a prerequisite a monopoly over the use of divination” (54). Rather than simply an attempt to limit the influence of the Mongol nobility, as previous scholarship has suggested, the purpose of the Golden Urn, Oidtmann contends, was to “stamp out doubts in reincarnate lamas and shore up faith in the Geluk church,” and “eliminate the danger that unsupervised communication with the spirit world posed to faith in the Geluk teachings and the political order that the court believed hinged on that faith” (77). In this way, like Khun and Joanna Waley-CohenFootnote ² before him, Oidtmann traces the court's intervention in Tibetan Buddhist succession practices within a more general fixation over the usurpation of the emperor's claim to monopolize contact with the supernatural world and his right to delineate heterodox teachings from state-sanctioned orthodoxies.

Having arrived at a remedy for the crisis of faith the Qianlong Emperor was sure had infected the institution of the reincarnate lama, act 2 describes efforts by the emperor and his surrogates to undermine the credibility of Tibet's leading oracles and legitimize the Golden Urn. Significantly, Oidtmann writes that these efforts “were built on a particular conception of ‘faith’ and … a desire to achieve compliance not through force but by changing Tibetans’ personal conviction” (101). This would be achieved in part through evidentiary investigation and judicial interrogation meant (and in some cases manipulated in ways) to discredit the “indigenous technology” of divination and to undermine the authority of the Eighth Dalai Lama. In act 3, the center of action moves to the Amdo borderlands to demonstrate the roles that Tibetan ecclesiastic elites played in the legitimization of the Golden Urn ritual. Focusing on the great monastery of Labrang Trashi Khyil (present-day southern Gansu), Oidtmann shows how “the monastery leadership's desire to locate the third-generation rebirth of their founding lama, the Jamyang Zhepa kūtuktu, independently according to their own procedures collided with the emperor's new law” (20). Employing “secret Manchu-language dispatches and Tibetan-language chronicles” (20), he finds that it was Tibetan Buddhist lamas aligned with the Qing state that ultimately secured the urn's acceptance among the Geluk establishment. “Far from undermining indigenous authorities or weakening institutionalized reincarnation,” Oidtmann summarizes that the ritual both “endowed the winning candidate with political capital and even military protection, not to mention financial emoluments,” and strengthened the authority of the Ganden Podrang government of the Dalai Lamas, “even granting it renewed or unprecedented influence over [reincarnate lamas] in peripheral regions such as Amdo and Kham” (200).

The polemics surrounding the Sino-Tibetan dispute have led many commentators to insist that the Golden Urn was an unwelcome foreign imposition that had little real-world effect on the Tibetan Buddhist practice of recognizing the rebirth of prominent lamas, a position that Oidmann argues is “based on modern, twentieth-century assumptions concerning the coherence and stability of ‘Tibetan’ as a category of meaning during the Qing period (164). To the contrary, Oidtmann shows that the Golden Urn was not only widely used throughout much of the nineteenth century, but that “ultimately it was Tibetan elites themselves who found a home for the urn within indigenous traditions of divination and erased from the historical record doubts about its use” (20). Of course, his assertion that the Golden Urn was successfully integrated into Tibetan methods of choosing reincarnate lamas should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the CCP's efforts to revive the ritual. Referring to the 1995 ceremony at the Jokhang, Oidtmann writes, “The scale of this carefully orchestrated endeavor reflects the difficulty of erasing the irony of an avowedly socialist and atheist state's attempt to resurrect the ‘feudal’ institutions and ‘superstitious’ customs of the imperial past among its ethnic minorities” (2–4). After all, as Oidtmann demonstrates, elite Qing-era actors operated within markedly different notions of sovereignty, identity, and loyalty than those championed by representatives of the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, the Party's appropriation of the Golden Urn ritual might be considered a particularly stunning example of the contortions modern states often make when attempting to claim the rights and legitimacies of imperial predecessors and evidence of the limited ideological resources the current Chinese state has to convince many Tibetan, Mongol, and other non-Han communities of their stake in the modern Chinese nation.