The Rise of Gnpo Namgyel in Kham The Blind Warrior of Nyarong [Hardcover]

Yudru Tsomu's book, The Rise of G?npo Namgyel in Kham: The Blind Warrior of Nyarong, is a vitally important and inspiring work that represents a new standard not only for Eastern Tibetan history, the focus for events in the book, but also for the study of border regions of the Tibetan cultural world more generally.... Yudru Tsomu's vivid representation of G?npo Namgyel's career greatly enriches our understanding of Kham's history through her attention to myriad source materials and local histories, and is therefore invaluable to scholars of Tibetan history and culture,especially working on frontier areas. Her accessible writing style and lively evocation of key events makes her work appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as general audiences interested in Tibetan history and culture.The Rise of G?npo Namgyel in Kham: The Blind Warrior of Nyarong is a masterful depiction of culture and society of eastern Tibet (Kham). Shedding the narratives of both Lhasa and Beijing, Tsomu Yudru adopts a regional perspective to bring to life one of the most famous personages of the Tibetan plateau in the nineteenth century, G?npo Namgyel. Tsomus gift lies in her unerring ability to trace his remarkable path to power that fused religious, cultural, and political traditions to his own ends, but also in her scholarly determination to reveal the remarkable implications of his rule through a regional lens. This is a brilliant study that utilizes sources from Tibetan, Chinese, and European sources yet creates a history that rarely, if ever, has been told in such elaborate detail and attention to local perspectives. It speaks to scholars working on frontier relations, historians of comparative colonialism, experts of Tibet, China and Buddhism, and the history of borderlands.Dr. Yudru Tsomu has written a superbly crafted book that not only introduces G?npo Namgyal, who has achieved a mythical status in Tibetan oral history, but provided the first comprehensivl³a