From the mid-nineteenth-century Hui rebellions, which challenged centralised state control, to the early-twentieth-century revolutions, which led to Yunnan’s decades-long independence, local actors shaped the history of Yunnan through their extensive cross-border networks and contradictory roles in the attempted state consolidation of this contested area. Among the local elites, the state agents, both Han and non-Han, acted on the state's behalf in the borderlands’ affairs while seeking the balance between the interests of the state and their own communities. The state agents competed with each other while utilising and wresting with the state authorities. The dynamic relationship between the state and local actors created another contested facet of modern Yunnan’s transformation. Competing narratives emerged when local actors negotiated and reconstructed their status within the contemporary Chinese nation-state. Bandits became heroes; separatists became patriots; a vibrant regional center became an isolated, exotic, and marginal province of the People’s Republic of China.

Diana Duan teaches history at Brigham Young University-Provo. She is interested in China and Southeast Asia, with focuses on borderlands, ethnic economy and culture, migration, environmental history, and the CCP history.

Introduction: Contingent Loyalties
Chapter 1: The Han Homelands in the Multiethnic Qing Borderlands
Chapter 2: Investigating and Writing about the Margary Affair
Chapter 3: From Bandits to Heroes
Chapter 4: The Imperial Agents in the Contested Realms
Chapter 5: Documenting the Hui Rebellion and Genocide
Chapter 6: Trading while Fighting
Chapter 7: The Imperial Frontier and the Native Lands of Inheritance
Chapter 8: Modernisation or Separatism? Competing Narratives of the Revolution
Conclusion
Index