ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 ties the international and state affairs that revolved around the British Sladen Mission and Augustus Margary back to the local actors in Upper Burma and Western Yunnan. The chapter contextualises the state agents who were involved in domestic and international affairs in the Yunnan-Burma borderlands from the 1850s to the 1870s. By examining their construction of Han lineage and homelands, the chapter aims to explicate how the state agents established their territorial and cultural dominance in China’s multiethnic frontier that would become the centre of imperial contest and internal rebellions in the mid-nineteenth century.
