Research into the print culture of late-Qing and Republican China has revealed a vibrant world of print media. Recent studies have also shown that far from being marginalized, religion in modern China enjoyed widespread popularity and in many cases expanded its field of activity. This book explores how religious ideas and practices in modern China were transformed as a result of their engagement with modern print culture.

Based on the author's cross-regional fieldwork, archival findings, and critical reading of memoirs and creative works of Tibetans and Chinese, this book recounts how the potency of Tibet manifests itself in modern material culture concerning Tibet, which is interwoven with state ideology, politics of identity, imagination, nostalgia, forgetting, remembering, and earth-inspired transcendence. The physical place of Tibet is the antecedent point of contact for subsequent spiritual imaginations, acts of destruction and reconstruction, collective nostalgia, and delayed aesthetic and...

What does it mean to be modern? This study regards the idea of society as most fundamental to the modern self-understanding. This idea crystallized in the concept of 'society' but may, partially, also be expressed by related concepts. Identifying Arabic conceptualizations of the idea of society in the journal al-Manar, the mouthpiece of Islamic Modernism, the author shows how modernity was articulated from within an Islamic discursive tradition.