Erected in 1502, the two Tangut dhāraṇī pillars in Baoding, Hebei, are the latest datable Tangut materials known to history. Scholars have generally focused almost exclusively on their recency, however, overlooking the historical contexts of their erection. Meanwhile, historians have long sought to understand the patterns of local societies in northern China following the fall of the Northern Song, yet the histories of minor ethnic groups, like the Tanguts, remain underexplored. By contextualizing the pillars within their historical setting, this study seeks to improve understanding of the material and offer a new perspective on the local history of post-Jin northern China. The article has three main parts, concerning 1) the historical information the pillars’ inscriptions provide; 2) the religious practice of the Tangut community and its historical origin; and 3) the varied social status of the pillars’ patrons and the power dynamics they reflect.

Stone-carved “wheels of Dhamma” (dhammacakkas) symbolizing the Buddha’s enduring teachings constitute an aesthetic corpus of objects once raised on columns set in ornate bases. These dhammacakkas were produced in central Thailand in the second half of the first millennium during the Dvāravatī period. Some carry Pali inscriptions which bear witness to the state of the Pali textual tradition in central Siam in the seventh to ninth centuries. Given that no Pali manuscripts from South or Southeast Asia from this early period survive, these epigraphic witnesses are extremely important. This research article presents inscriptions inscribed on a Dvāravatī-period dhammacakka and an octagonal pillar recovered in Thailand’s Chainat province. A closer examination of the epigraphs has allowed us to give improved readings of the available fragments. This has enabled us to present what may be described as the oldest extant recension of the core passages of the Pali Dhammacakkappavattana, Gotama the Buddha’s first teaching.

This article examines how “human affect” (renqing) – the interplay of affect, moral obligation and social legitimacy – operates as both a mechanism of governance and a site of contestation in police mediation in contemporary China. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in two police stations in Zhejiang province, I conceptualize renqing as an affective grammar: a system of emotional expression and recognition that structures interaction across interpersonal and institutional settings. The party-state’s revival of the Fengqiao model has transformed renqing from a micro-political norm into an institutionalized instrument of affective governance. Mediation formalizes affect through contracts, scripted performances and service quotas, stratifying emotional legitimacy along lines of class, gender and migration. The article theorizes affective autonomy as participants’ resistance through silence, withdrawal or alternative alignments. It complicates portrayals of policing as purely coercive, highlighting the emotional labour and limits of grassroots governance.

This article analyses the contribution of Mīrzā Āqāsī (1197–1265/1783–1849) to the political theology literature of the Qajar period and, consequently, to the dynamics and tensions between Sufism and power in Iranian Shi‘i society. Āqāsī was the first minister of the Qajar king Muḥammad Shāh (r. 1250–1264/1834–1848) and the author of an important political treatise titled Chahār-i faṣl-i sulṭānī va shīam-i farūkhī (The Four Royal Discourses and the Nobles’ Principles of Conduct). This treatise presents several original features, particularly regarding the classical views on the spiritual and political hierarchy in Islam, as well as within the context of the culture of authority in a Shi‘i setting. These views are expressed by Āqāsī in a partially initiatory mode, which renders their interpretation complex and open.

This article provides a detailed description of an undocumented use of zaìshì 在勢 as a deontic adverb in Late Qing and Early Republican Chinese literature. This word commonly functions as a verb (“to hold power”) or a nominalized verb (“one who holds power”), but its use as a preposed deontic adverb, meaning “under these circumstances”, is not attested in earlier Chinese texts and has no cognates in other Sinitic languages. The author analyses the syntax and semantics of zaìshì in a large corpus of medieval Chinese texts and early Chinese translations of foreign literature. The article then suggests that the preposed deontic adverb zaìshì emerged as the result of the appropriation of linguistic elements present in classical literature but whose use had been restricted to classical forms of literary composition.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Japan maintained a “special relationship” with Myanmar, often bucking the policy approach of Western countries to provide financial and political support to the country’s military leaders. Following the February 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, however, Japan’s policy approach toward the country notably shifted in response to domestic and international pressures. Utilizing declassified documents from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and other Japanese-language sources, this study examines how Japanese diplomacy toward Myanmar evolved in response to the coup. Through a structured assessment of Japan’s geopolitical strategy, bureaucratic politics, and the influence of informal actors, the study demonstrates how these interconnected factors prompted Tokyo to “rethink” certain aspects of its relationship with Myanmar while maintaining distinctive elements of its previous approach.

This article traces the figure of the lūṭī in the writings of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 1350) and Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373). These two fourteenth-century scholars adopted a harsh and uncompromising view of the lūṭī as a sexual actor, repeatedly depicting the horrific afterlife punishments awaiting him in Hell. As part of their hyperbolic and extreme depiction of the lūṭī as a damned sexual figure, they imagine him through his communal relationship to his forebears, both among the Qur’anic People of Lūṭ and those like him in his present day. They thereby construct a sexual community of sorts, framing the lūṭī through a parodic repurposing of a strikingly Islamic idiom of belonging and community-building. In doing so, I argue, these texts open up broad possibilities for us to rethink how medieval authors theorised what we might call ‘sexual identity’ and understood sex to construct ways of being in the world around them.