Dittmar Schorkowitz, Ph.D. (1991), Free University of Berlin, is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale (Germany). He has published extensively, including 'Historical Anthropology in Eurasia… and the Way Thither,' in History and Anthropology 23,1 (2012).

Chia Ning, Ph.D. (1992), The Johns Hopkins University, is a professor of history at Central College in Pella, Iowa (USA). Many of her publications are about the Lifanyuan, including, 'The Qing Lifanyuan and the Solon People of the 17th-18th Centuries,' in Athens Journal of History, 1, 4 (October 2015).

In Managing Frontiers in Qing China, historians and anthropologists explore China's imperial expansion in Inner Asia, focusing on early Qing empire-building in Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and beyond – Central Asian perspectives and comparisons to Russia's Asian empire are included. Taking an institutional-historical and historical-anthropological approach, the essays engage with two Qing agencies well-known for their governance of non-Han groups: the Lifanyuan and Libu.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the Lifanyuan and Libu, revising and assessing the state of affairs in the under-researched field of these two institutions. The contributors explore the imperial policies towards and the shifting classifications of minority groups in the Qing Empire, explicitly pairing and comparing the Lifanyuan and Libu as in some sense cognate agencies. This text offers insight into how China's past has continued to inform its modern policies, as well as the geopolitical make-up of East Asia and beyond.

Contributors include: Uradyn E. Bulag, Chia Ning, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Nicola DiCosmo, Dorothea Heuschert-Laage, Laura Hostetler, Fabienne Jagou, Mei-hua Lan, Dittmar Schorkowitz, Song Tong, Michael Weiers,Ye Baichuan, Yuan Jian, Zhang Yongjiang.