Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and the medical marketplace of Qing China

During the late seventeenth to early twentieth century period remembered for the rise of science along mercantile-colonialist sea routes, Tibetan served as an important lingua franca within medical literature and Tibetan Buddhist monastic medical colleges, which flourished across East Asia along inland routes stabilized by the pax Manjurica. This dissertation analyzes these institutional and intellectual developments, drawing on an array of multi-lingual sources, to historicize the Tibetan medical system, its cosmology, and its community of practitioners within the context of Qing imperial expansion and decline. Bringing recent perspectives on the multi-ethnic dimensions of the Qing empire into conversation with scholarship on the history of science in China, this research considers how the Tibetan medical system bridged disparate cultures and political economies across northern China, Mongolia, and Tibet, providing a beneficial resource for sometimes competing projects of local governance and imperial diplomacy within the diverse medical marketplace of the Qing empire.