A Gift Across Empires: Bambar’s Sabre and the Material Politics of Steppe Diplomacy

The ANU Mongolia Institute hosts an interdisciplinary series of presentations on Mongolia. The sessions typically include a 45-minute presentation of recent research or fieldwork on a topic related to Mongolia or the Mongolian diaspora, followed by an opportunity to chat and get caught up on what the institute is doing.

A Gift Across Empires: Bambar’s Sabre and the Material Politics of Steppe Diplomacy

This seminar will explore the diplomatic life of a sabre given by Catherine II to the Kalmyk noble Bambar in 1762, asking what happens when an imperial gift refuses to remain within the empire that produced it. Originally awarded as a reward for military loyalty on Russia’s southeastern frontier, the sabre was intended to bind Bambar to the Russian Empire. Its later history, however, shows how such objects could acquire new and unexpected meanings. In 1771, during the Torghut exodus to Qing China under the leadership of Ubashi Khan, Bambar was among those at the head of the movement. There, he presented the Russian sabre to the Qianlong Emperor as a diplomatic gift, transforming its meaning: rather than symbolising loyalty to Russia, it became a gesture of allegiance to the Qing court.

Drawing on Russian and Qing sources, this seminar will argue that the sabre functioned not merely as a gift, but as a tool of negotiation and political repositioning. More broadly, it shows how objects could play an active role in diplomacy, especially in frontier regions where imperial power was unstable. Rather than stabilising imperial authority, such objects could unsettle it, moving across borders and acquiring new political meanings. The case of Bambar’s sabre highlights the flexible and improvised nature of diplomacy in eighteenth-century Eurasia and contributes to wider discussions about how material culture shaped political relationships across empires.

Speakers
 
Dr Ekaterina Heath is an art historian at the University of Sydney, currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (ERC-funded ECOINT project). Her work explores how images and objects carry meaning across time, borders, and empires.

Dr Alexander Tsuryumov is an independent scholar and one of the leading specialists on the history of the Kalmyk Khanate. Drawing on deep archival expertise in Russian and Kalmyk sources, his work spans Kalmyk political history, steppe diplomacy, and the frontier world of eighteenth-century Eurasia.