'East of the Orient': Roman Tsyrenpilov and the Challenges of Knowledge Production in the Imperial Situation

• In Event: Shades of Russian Orientalism: Comparing Imperial Russian Entanglements with Islamic and Buddhist Easts

Abstract

In 1870, Roman Tsyrenpilov, a Buryat convert to Orthodoxy and would-be missionary, set out from Irkutsk to proselytize in the so-called Manchurian Wedge, a group of 64 villages geographically located in the Russian Empire but populated and administered by ethnic Manchus — Qing subjects. The proposed paper explores how the entangled context of multiple ethnic, linguistic, confessional, and political diversity on the ground influenced Tsyrenpilov’s production of “useful knowledge.”

Author

• Ismael Biyashev, U of Michigan