The Study On The Monument Of The Mountaineering Of The Junggar Megler

Memorial of the Conquest of Zunghar at Gedeng Mountain " (further abbreviated as "Memorial") is a memorial with inscriptions in Chinese, Manchu, Clear Script (Oirat), and Tibetan, erected under the rule of Qianlong Emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty. The memorial's inscription describes the campaign of the Manchu Qing armies led by two routes into Ili in the 20nd year of Qianlong era (1755). By a versified form it retails the history, how 25 men from the Qing army went to attack the military garrison of Zhunghar Khan Dawaci; how Dawaci escaped but was captured at the end. It celebrates merits of Amursana at Qianlong's campaign against Ili and capturing Dawaci. It criticizes operations by Dawaci and records merits at the conquest of Zunghar Khanate.In this work I strove to analyse systematically historical context of erection of the memorial, construction process of the memorial, people assigned to construct the memorial, times of the memorial's construction and renovations, textology of the inscriptions and its contents. I have based all related materials available to the memorial and used methods of the source research and linguistic analysis. My work consists of five sections:the introduction, the core study (3 chapters), results, bibliography and attachments.In the introductory part I provided a brief presentation of the memorial, accounts about the inscriptions, overview of the previous studies, purpose and objectives of my study, and my research methodology.In the first chapter I focused on the historical context of the memorial's construction. I described the dispute for the throne succession after the death of Galdanceren Khaan in 1745 and the relations between Dawaci and Amursana. In the second part I described the Manchu Qing Aggression to Zunghar conducted in two directions and the battle at Gedeng Mountain.In the second chapter I studied the process of erecting the memorial. Using Manchu materials of the Military Affairs Archives, I worked out a detailed analysis of the reasons, why the first attempt to construct the memorial in 1758 became unsuccessful, as well as the description of the preparatory works, and identification of people assigned to erect the memorial (Fu Kui, Sogingy-a). According to the previous diverse statements of various scholars, the time of the attempts to construct the memorial was 1759. They mentioned an opinion, that the construction works of the memorial finished in 1762. The history since the termination of the construction has been more than 200 years, that is why the memorial was repeatedly endangered by winds, storms, rains, earthquake, and other similar disasters. I made a brief overview of the restoration works and described the renovation works done in 6th month of 1884 and 1904 in details.In the third chapter I studied an important part of the epigraphy studies, contents of the inscription. In the first part I made a transcription of the Chinese version of the inscription, recorded all of the previously published versions of the inscription from the local monographs, chronicles, articles and other literary works, as to elaborate the differences among them and relations of various versions (renderings) of the inscription. In the second part I made a transcription of the Clear script inscription, converted it into the Latin transcription, provided a word commentary, and by means of comparing the Chinese and Manchu translations I reconstructed the illegible words of the Clear script inscription. In the third part I made a transcription of the Manchu version of the inscription, converted it into the Latin transcription, and by means of comparing the Chinese and Clear Script translations I reconstructed the illegible words of the Manchu inscription. In the fourth part, by the means of a comparative translatological approach to the contents of the Chinese, Manchu and Clear script versions of the inscription I depicted their mutual relations. In the conclusion section I resumed the main contents of my paper, assessed the benefits and imperfections of my study, and marked out important problems for a further study.