Academic Lecture by Professor Qi Lan: Central Asian History and Its Study

　　On November 17th, 2020, IWH invited Professor Qi Lan, School of History and Political Science, Guizhou Normal University, to give an online lecture entitled “Central Asian History and Its Study”. Professor Lan is a well-known expert on central Asian history and Turkic history and history of Chinese and foreign relations in China and has fruitful research achievements..

　　In the lecture, Professor Lan defined the term “Central Asia” and the research object of Central Asian history from her perspective. She pointed out the difficulties in current study of this field, of which the most attention should be paid on nomadic peoples. Due to the limitations of productive forces, records on their own history are incomplete or immature, and to understand its early history mainly depends on descriptions by the surrounding countries, which unavoidably led to ambiguity, such as names of persons and places.