Regarding the claim that " has been part of since the ", the following are some relevant extracts from "Imperial China 900-1800" (Harvard, 1999), by the late Emeritus Professor Frederick W. Mote of Princeton.

Chapter 20: China under Mongol Rule Section I: Yuan Government Tibet: (pp. 483-485)

The most important of the unprecedented special agencies was the Commission for Tibetan and Buddhist Affairs, the Xuanzhengyuan, rank I.B. It managed the entire Buddhist clergy throughout the realm, and supervised all temples, monasteries, and other Buddhist properties, at least in name. It was also responsible in a curious way for administering Tibet. That is, this office was given responsibility for administering the Buddhist establishment in Tibet, which was tantamount to giving the persons in charge of that office the dominant role in local governing. During his reign Khubilai’s interest shifted away from Chan , then the dominant trend in Chinese Buddhist teachings (but not a separate sect, as was Chan, or Zen, in Japan). Lamaist Buddhism from Tibet came to supersede Chan in his religious life. The Tibetan monk Phagspa (P’ags-pa, 1235-1280) was named the National Preceptor, subsequently elevated to the title of by Khubilai in the 1260s. He was concurrently named the director of the Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs.

Phagspa is one of the more remarkable figures in Yuan history; he was an intellectual figure of undoubted genius, and administrator, and a spiritual leader and writer of great influence. After his death he became something of a Buddhist patron saint of the Yuan government. He used his very close relationship with the emperor not only to promote in China but also to advance the interests of his sect of Lamaism in Tibet. His close relatives and other leaders of the Sa-skya sect were appointed, on his advice, either to act as the ’s viceroy or to staff the crucial Pacification Commission for Tibet. In this way the Yuan court found eager surrogates to govern Tibet for them. Those measures, however, clearly did not bring Tibet under ’s rule. The Mongol army did not invade and conquer that country, not did it maintain any regular military presence there, although on a few occasions it did attempt to coerce dissidents and rebels by limited military actions or by stationing intimidating forces on the borders.

Chapter 27: Ming China’s Borders Section III. Tibet and the Western Borders (pp. 698-700; see map p. 699)

1 China’s western frontier in Ming times extended from the arid loess region of Gansu in the northwest, southward along the edges of the Himalayan upland, then into the subtropical jungles of western and Burma.

The northwest was administered under a sprawling Shaanxi Province that included much of later Gansu and supervised the military government of the Gansu Corridor that then lay beyond the provincial boundaries. That northwest extension of Ming local administration was surrounded by autonomous Mongol tribal federations whose leaders had been given the honorific Ming titles of Pacification Commissioners. Important among them were groups called Dada (Tatar), and some known as constituents of the Oyirat Mongol federation (i.e., the tribe), along with other tribal groups. During Ming times the northwest thus contained a broad array of Chinese, Mongol, and Turkic peoples that included some Uighur and other Islamic communities. And there were Tibetans.

Most of the western border zone, from the northwest corner of China southward, was dominated by a range of peoples usually identified as Tibetans. They were the most numerous and historically the most important of China’s western neighbors. In Ming times we can think of them as the Tibetans of central Tibet, or Tibet Proper (Xikang), with its capital at , and the Tibetans of the eastern extension of the Himalayan upland along the western border of China ( and the region adjacent to western ) (Map 18). These northern and eastern Tibetans were often called the Qiang people in history.

Tibet developed a literate high culture in the sixth and seventh centuries C.E. (about the same time as Japan and Korea). That also is when it accepted both Buddhism and literacy through its southwestern borders with Indian civilizations. The still earlier culture is now thought to have arisen in far western Tibet, in Central Asia. The first well-organized state in Tibet Proper, however, controlling central Tibet where present-day Lhasa is located, took form in the seventh century. That was a vigorously expansive period; Tibetan armies pushed out to conquer widely in all directions. On their east and northeast they made serious incursions into Tang China’s western boundaries. We know a great deal about this formative period in Tibet’s history because Chinese historical records clearly document the Tang involvement with the Tibetan kingdom of that time. Cultural relations with Tang China began to develop, and in 641 the Tang emperor acceded to the demand of the Tibetan king to forumulize their relationship by sending him an imperial princess to wed. The power of that secular kingdom subsequently disintegrated; after the ninth century, Tibet gradually came to be ruled by local leaders of its Buddhist church. Cultural links with China were greatly diminished thereafter while Tibet turned its attention to its southern and eastern borders. Profound involvement with Indian culture through several centuries produced the great age of Tibetan religious and philosophical writing and of religious poetry.

2 When the Muslim conquest of northeastern India took place about the year 1200, Tibet’s relations with India were reduced, but by that time Indian learning was well established in Tibet’s many monasteries; a Tibeto-Indian intellectual tradition continued to grow.

During the ' Yuan dynasty (1272-1368), Tibet came back into significant relationship with China; the Mongol emperors intended to control Tibet, but without conquering it. Khubilai Khan had marched southward along the eastern edges of the Amdo Tibetan border region on his way to invade Yunnan in 1253. In 1290 the Yuan government sent forces into the country to attack and suppress a sect threatening the hegemony of the Saskya-pa, whom the Mongols favored as their surrogates in Tibet. Otherwise, the Mongols seldom intervened militarily. Through Yuan times, the Mongol government in Beijing was content to exercise a loose authority through Saskya-pa lamas [such as the Buddhist teacher Phagspa, who was Khubilai Khan's preceptor]. It threatened to use military force while giving official titles such as viceroy to Tibetan spiritual heads, confirming them in both spiritual and temporal powers. In fact, the Mongols of the Yuan period maintained no presence in Tibet and allowed their surrogates, principally the lamas who headed the Red Hat (Saskya-pa) sect of Tibetan Buddhism, to rule as they pleased.

In the early Ming the Chinese displayed still less concern about the country itself, content to keep the western frontier secure by diplomatic means such as extending courtesies to leading figures of the Lamaist church. The (1402-1424), always seeking ways to legitimize his usurpation, was eager for heads of border states to acknowledge him. In the case of Tibet, he bestowed lavish gifts on Tibetan church leaders. In 1407-1408 the fifth reincarnation of the founder of the Black Hat Karma-pa sect, known in Chinese records as Halima, made the journey to , where the Yongle emperor asked him to perform memorial services for his parents. At the same time performed many magical acts, earning the awe of the the Chinese capital. He was invited, however, as a miracle worker; political and other considerations were secondary.

The Yongle emperor also heard about Halima's famous contemporary Tsong- kha-pa (1357-1419), the founder of the Yellow Hat or -pa sect, whose heads later became known as the Dalai Lamas. He entreated Tsung-kha-pa to visit the Ming capital, but was spurned. When later Ming emperors invited such dignitaries to visit the Ming capital at Nanjing or at Beijing, they declined, always sending lower-ranking monks as their envoys. Tibetan lamas (monks), often regarded as persons of extraordinary spiritual powers, were patronized by several of the Ming emperors and members of the imperial household, as well as by prominent members of the official elite, and were frequently in residence at Buddhist temples in the capital and elsewhere throughout the country. A

3 vivid image of the “western regions monk” appears in the mentality of Ming China, as also in present-day entertainment literature and cinema.

Trade moved in considerable quantity in and out of Tibet through Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, and religious interaction in those border provinces was also lively. Historians of art see significant Chinese impact on Tibetan painting and woodcarving in Ming times. Although rare earlier examples exist, by the fifteenth century the Chinese technology for woodblock printing began to be widely used for reproducing Tibetan religious texts. Tibetan learning in fields such as medicine was admired in China. Chinese institutions, ethics, and sciences, however successfully exported on other frontiers, made little impact in Tibet. Politically, Ming China's relations with Tibet were distant and cool.

Tibet's relations with during Ming times were, by contrast, very close. Tsong-kha-pa’s third successor was identified as his reincarnation, and thereafter the leaders of the Yellow Hat sect all came to their position in that way. The Yellow Hat sect (Gelug-pa) achieved great stature in Tibet in the fifteenth century for the rigor of its monastic discipline and its systematic teachings. At a time when Tibet’s internal wars and conflicts among the older so-called Red Hat and Black Hat sects were often decided by Mongol intervention, the Yellow Hat sect had remained apart from politics.

The Third (1543-1588) changed that. In 1577 he accepted the invitation of Altan Khan (ca. 1507 – ca. 1582) to visit Mongolia, leading Altan Khan to declare Tibetan Buddhism the official religion of all the Mongols, as noted in the preceding section. The khan bestowed on him the Mongol word “Dalai” as a title; it means “oceanic” or “all-encompassing in wisdom,” a title also extended posthumously to his two predecessors and carried by his successors to this day. He gave the Mongol khan the title “King of Religion” in return for the khan’s oath that Mongols would henceforth forbid blood sacrifice and other objectionable aspects of Mongolian religious practice. From that time forward the Yellow Hat sect was inextricably involved in secular affairs; it came to carry both religious and political leadership. On his travels to Mongolia, the Third Dalai Lama stopped at Koko Nor (later the province of ) in northeastern Amdo, where Tsong-kha-pa was born in 1357, to found a school of Lamaist studies at what was to become the famous monastery of Kumbum. In that region where Tibetan and Mongolian populations met, this prominent center of religious learning played an important role in the two nations’ subsequent relations.

When the Third Dalai Lama’s reincarnation was found to be the great-grandson of Altan Khan, Tibetan links to Mongolia became even stronger. As the Fourth (1589-1617), he was the only Dalai Lama who was not a Tibetan. In 1601-2 he was escorted from his home in Mongolia first to Koko Nor, where he was born (near the birthplace of Tsong-kha-pa), then on to Lhasa by a great entourage of Mongol nobles and protective cavalry forces, making the Mongol princes chief

4 actors in the internal affairs of Tibet. The consequence was resentment among Tibetans, heightened conflict between the Yellow Hats and the other major sects, and a destabilized domestic society. The Mongolian intervention in internal affairs became a deciding element in governing because Tibet maintained only insignificant armed forces; competing factions among Tibetan church leaders became accustomed to calling for help from rival claimants to military supremacy in Mongolia. The domestic disputes of the one became the arena for settling scores of the other. Mongol adventurers, especially from among the Western Mongols, frequently sallied through Tibet on visits that took on the character of raids.

The Ming state recognized the potential harm to its interests in the alliances between Tibet and Mongolia yet could do little to forestall them. It strove to control the movement of Mongols across the Ordos and the Gansu Corridor, the two countries’ line of direct communication, and sought to impose influence on the Ordos and Tümed Mongol federations in the strategic northwest region. Despite Chinese efforts, the Mongol-Tibetan axis became a fixed element of Inner Asian politics thereafter.

Yellow Hat leadership faltered briefly after the death of the Fourth Dalai Lama in 1617, but with Mongol military assistance it recovered triumphantly during the reign of “the Great Fifth” Dalai Lama (1617-1682), as he is known in Tibetan history. One of the most important figures in Tibetan history, he gradually consolidated the Yellow Hat sect’s hold on all of Tibet and played a key role in subsequent Manchu involvement there. The Fifth Dalai Lama built the Potala, the huge fortress-palace overlooking Lhasa, which symbolized the power of the Gelug-pa sect.

In Mongolia after 1577 (when Altan Khan declared Tibetan Buddhism the official religion of the Mongol nation), the Mongol princes and their subject tribesmen did not all immediately accept Tibetan Buddhism, nor were all of those who did so subservient to the Yellow Hat sect. Gradually, however, it prevailed. Its institutions and its religious authority took hold throughout Mongolia, with the consequences discussed earlier (see Section II: Tension and Peril on the Northern Borders). In fact, the religion’s growing impact on the Mongols incidentally made them more amenable to coexistence with sedentary civilization.

To follow the story forward for a century or two, the early Manchu emperors of the after 1644 were successful in taking over the Mongols’ special relationship with Tibet. Their security in Inner Asia depended on that. The Great Fifth Dalai Lama accepted the invitation of the new Qing court at Beijing to visit China in 1652-53; that visit had something to do with the youthful Shunzhi emperor’s turning away from the Jesuit missionaries at his court to devote himself ardently to Buddhism. The visit led to the lavish patronage of Tibetan church leaders by the Qing court and paved the way for

5 the direct intervention by the (r. 1662-1722) in seating the Seventh Dalai Lama (1708-1757). That phase of Tibet’s relations with China will be discussed in Chapter 33, Section IV: Manchu/Qing Power and the Problem of Tibet).

Section IV: The “Soft Border” of the Chinese South

(pp. 714-715) …Ming Sichuan included within its western borders jurisdiction over the Kham region of eastern Tibetan peoples. The several large military [“native offices”] in that region were headed by men designated as Tibetans (Zang) or by Qiang (perhaps Amdo Tibetans), and in one case by Mongols. Some of them were at least nominally responsible for supervising Tibetan populations lying still farther west. On its west Sichuan, like Yunnan, thus had an international boundary, but one (unlike Yunnan’s southern and western borders) that did not come to be defined by European-imposed international law in the nineteenth century. The consequence is that Sichuan’s western boundary has continued to be defined by traditional Chinese border zone attitudes and political strategies until the present day. Provinces could and can be added or abolished, boundaries pushed far out or drawn sharply back in; governing can be civil or military, direct or tenuously delegated, all as the Chinese central government of the time finds appropriate. Because the definitions it imposes (since 1950) make all of the affected people “Chinese”, their status becomes strictly an issue of domestic policy – just as the status of American Indians is in reality a matter of United States domestic governing. The historical difference is that as late as the 1950s some of the larger minority polities within the boundaries of modern China still possessed a significant measure of genuine self-rule. That was notably true on Sichuan’s western borders.

Chapter 33: The Kangxi Reign: the Emperor and His Age Section III: The Mongols on the Northern Borders

(p. 868-869) The Manchus’ rise to power in Inner Asia depended in the beginning on their ties to their Mongol neighbors in western Manchuria, and thereafter on their continuing skill in exploiting the sphere of Mongol relationships…..

With an exception of Tibet, which was a distinct polity not made administratively subordinate to the Qing, the new regions of , Mongolia ( only, after 1949), and Manchuria are today equal in area to within the Great Wall (see map 22 in Chapter 36). These Asian lands were added to the traditional Chinese state by the force of Manchu cavalry, with large components of Mongol cavalry and, to a lesser extent, Chinese military units supplying strategic auxiliary services as well as foot soldiers. The Mongols’ participation was crucial to the success of an empire-

6 building process in which they were at first essential allies, gradually thereafter reduced to the status of mere subjects, albeit privileged ones.

(pp. 870-871) The intractable Mongol problem in Qing times, from the 1670s in the Kangxi reign to the 1750s in the Qianlong reign, was that of the Western Mongols. Under the early Ming, the Oyirat Mongols (Oirat, Ölöd, Eleuth, and so on; “Oyirat” is used here as a general name for the Western Mongols) had captured the Ming emperor in 1449, but thereafter remained apart, and posed less threat to China than other Mongol tribal federations. Yet the Khoshut (Khoshote) tribal federation within the Oyirats became deeply involved in internal Tibetan affairs in the sixteenth century and thereafter, causing concern in Ming Beijing. Early in the Qing a new resurgence of Western Mongol power generated the “intractable problem,” one that came from a different tribal group within the Oyirat federation. These tribal people were called the Dzungars (Sungars, Junghars, Zungars, Jüngars) after their home region, the great basin of that makes up the northwestern part of present-day Xinjiang. In the late seventeenth century they were led by a clan of dynamic leaders who claimed lineal descent from Esen the Oyirat leader who captured the Ming emperor in 1449. Imposing their rule over other tribal groupings (e.g., the and Derbets) within the Oyirat or Western Mongol federation, they expanded to the west of the Pamir Mountains into present-day Kazakhstan, simultaneously also south of the Tian Shan Mountains into Muslim Turkic southern Xinjiang, and eastward into Khalkha Mongol territory. As sponsors and protectors of the Dalai Lamas, they also intervened in Tibetan affairs, becoming virtually the military overseers of Tibet. Their strongest leader, and the Kangxi emperor’s fiercest antagonist, was Galdan (1632?-1697).

Galdan claimed for himself the title of khan, or “emperor,” of the Dzungar federation. His father, a powerful chieftain, had sent Galdan as a boy to Lhasa to be educated as Yellow Sect lama. His older brother succeeded to the Dzungar chieftainship, but when that brother was killed in a family conflict, Galdan renounced his intentions to become a holy lama and, with the Dalai Lama’s permission, returned to his people to avenge his brother’s death and take over the chieftainship. He thus knew at firsthand both the power of the Tibetan religion and the secular and military conditions among his energized Dzungar Mongol federation. He became one of the most important Inner Asian leaders of the seventeenth century, in his impact on history ranking with the great empire builders.

The Kangxi court was well aware that a powerful Dzungar nation on the northwestern fringe of its growing Inner Asian empire could not only destabilize the and imperil the entire northern border regioin but also use its influence in Tibet to protect the religious authority of the Dalai Lamas; by that combination of military and religious means the Dzungars might try to exert control over all of Mongolia, where the Tibetan religion and its reincarnated leaders were venerated. That could strike at the heart of

7 Mongol allegiance to the Qing and cause disaffection among the Mongol banner armies. The Qing government’s Mongol alignment was crucial to maintaining the dynasty’s military intimidation in China as well as throughout the Inner Asian component of the empire. This Dzungar challenge therefore demanded the most forceful efforts to counter it. ……..

(pp. 874-876) The settlement reached with the Russians at Nerchinsk in 1689 freed the Kangxi emperor to turn his full attention to western Mongolia. He energetically led and participated in all aspects of the confrontation with Galdan’s Dzungars. To go back to the events of the late , the Dzungar aggression to the east against the Khalkha federation led the emperor to take under his protection the Khalkha princes…

The Kangxi emperor took charge in planning a decisive showdown, and himself led one of three armies that took to the field in the spring of 1696… Galdan fled westward with scarcely a thousand soldiers.

Early the next year the emperor took to the field farther west, as part of the final pursuit of Galdan…who, in hopeless flight, took poison in May 1697. His death did not end the Dzungar threat; in the next generation Galdan’s nephew and his descendants continued the resistance to Qing rule. They were not extinguished until the sent armies into the field in 1754- 1757 that totally eliminated Dzungar power…Their defeat allowed the Qing in the 1750s for the first time to gain firm control over all of Xinjiang, including the Muslim states throughout the Tarim basin of southern Xinjiang, and to strengthen their hand in Tibet. Qing relations with Tibet merit further discussion.

Section IV: Manchu/Qing Power and the Problem of Tibet (pp. 876-878)

Manchu rulers after 1644 were successful in taking over the Mongols' special relationship with Tibet; their security in Inner Asia depended on that, but the process of consolidating their hold required a hundred years. The Great Fifth Dalai Lama accepted the invitation of the new Qing court at Beijing to visit China in 1652-53. His visit had something to do with the youthful Shunzhi emperor's turning away from the Jesuit missionaries at his court to devote himself ardently to Buddhism. The Fifth Dalai Lama's visit led to the lavish patronage of Tibetan church leaders by the Qing court and paved the way for the intervention of the Kangxi emperor in seating the Seventh Dalai Lama (1708-1757), after ousting the Sixth Dalai Lama, of whom the Qing court disapproved. In many Qing official documents the Sixth is ignored and the Seventh is referred to as the Sixth.

The Kangxi emperor acknowledged the so-called Yellow Hat (or Gelug-pa sect) Dalai Lamas as the actual secular rulers of Tibet and attempted to use them to

8 extend the Qing court's influence throughout Tibet, much as Khubilai Khan and his successors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had attempted to use the heads of the Saskya-pa or Red Sect. The Manchus were no more successful; Tibet remained administratively independent of Qing China in all aspects of domestic governing. Manchu armies were sent to Tibet on a few occasions, and regularly maintained a military presence in Xining (in the Amdo region of northeastern Tibet on the China border). The Manchu armies in that region, lying between China and Tibet Proper, restored order and expelled competing Mongols. In that way they acquired sufficient force to guarantee the authority of the Dalai Lama against competing Tibetan interests. The Qing state was forced to take this step to counter the influence of the Western Mongols of the Khoshut federation, who also had long played the enforcer’s role, in competition both with the Dzungars and with China. The various western Mongol federations had long tried, and occasionally succeeded, in gaining territorial control over Xining and the Amdo as a base from which to dominate Tibet Proper.

It was essential to Manchu policy to prevent any alliance between the spiritual leaders in Tibet and leaders of Mongol steppe military power. In ceremonial exchanges, the Kangxi emperor compared himself with a reincarnation of Khubilai Khan (r. 1260-1294) in relation to his Tibetan Buddhist preceptor, Phagspa, who was seen as reincarnate in the Yellow Sect's Living Buddhas resident at the Qing court. The comparison was not apt: Khubilai Khan was genuinely moved by his religious convictions, while the Manchu emperor’s motives were purely political. It seems clear that he connived in the murder of the Sixth Dalai Lama in 1706; he had the motive and the means. When the Sixth Dalai Lama was reincarnated in 1708 as the Seventh, he was found in the region (Chinese, Xikang; at present Litang in far western Sichuan, where Manchu garrisons were then in control.) That well suited Manchu designs. The Kangxi emperor became the child’s sponsor, supervised his early upbringing, and had him escorted to Lhasa in 1720 to assume his position there. In some Qing accounts, Qing annexation of Tibet is dated to that moment, but that is an artful exaggeration.

The Manchus clearly tried to make puppets of the Dalai Lamas; in a decree issued by the Kangxi emperor in 1721, he falsely claimed that Tibet had been under Manchu suzerainty for eighty years, and now attempted to clarify that relationship in stricter terms. The Tibetans “persisted in envisaging it in terms of the traditional concept of ‘patron and priest’”. That is, they did not conceive the emperor’s claimed relationship to the Dalai Lama in political terms. In that immediate situation, as also in the long range, the Manchus were no more successful than their predecessors on the throne of China; Tibet remained wholly independent of Qing China in all aspects of its domestic governing, and its lama rulers had no political interests beyond that.

9 In any event, virtually all histories written in twentieth-century China, from the Revolution of 1911 onward, if they discuss Tibet at all, state simply that Tibet has “long” belonged to China while disagreeing on just when that began; some indeed insist that it has “always” been part of China. A leading specialist on Qing history has written that immediately after the Manchus defeated the Dzungar chieftain Galdan in 1696, “Tibet became permanently a vassal of China.” Another historian of the Qing wrote in 1935 that from the Yongzheng reign period, about 1727, “Tibet became wholly the territory of China.” A work written in the 1950s for a broader audience says, “Tibet is an inseparable part of our nation’s sovereign territory; from ancient times the region of Tibet has always been subject to our central governing authority.” [page 1046, note 36: Almost all Chinese-language histories, whether of Nationalist, Communist, or other persuasion, agree on this issue but disagree on the date of Tibet’s subjugation and cite contradictory evidence, if any. The quotations here are from Xiao Qingdai tongshi 5 vols. Taipei: Shangwu (1963 reprint of 1923 original), I: 558; Jin Zhaofeng, Qingshi Dagang, : Kaiming (1935), p. 231; and Wu Han, “Mingchu de xuexiao” (1948), reprinted in Wu Han, Dushi Zaji, (1956), pp. 317-341. Xiao Yishan’s discussion of Tibet in sections 113 and 114, pp. 849-855, is riddled with errors and inspires little confidence. Jin Zhaofeng, a careful but partial (pro-Manchu) historian, offers little or no support for his view. The popular work edited by Wu Han is typical of many recent writings on the subject in that it does not attempt to offer historical evidence.] The political view of this historical issue has been clearly drawn in recent times, but the historical argument turns on the peripheral issue of when the Manchus fully displaced the Western Mongols as the military guarantors of the Dalai Lama’s “unquestioned civil authority”. [p. 1046, note 37: A better date for final Chinese displacement of their Mongol rivals for influence in (but not rule over) Tibet might be 1750; in that year the Imperial Resident () representing the Manchu court at Lhasa became firmly established there after a rebellion favourable to lingering Oyirat (Dzungar) power was put down, and shortly before the Qianlong emperor’s victories that ended Dzungar power forever. Cf. Fang Chao-ying in Arthur Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, pp. 249-251, s.v. ‘-ch’ing’. It is nevertheless clear that no Chinese or Manchu officials ever held governing responsibilties in Tibet. The account of Tibet as a border principality in the Draft Qing History 1927 (1977) juan 525, esp. pp. 14531-39, makes that abundantly clear.] No matter when that occurred, it is irrelevant to the question of Tibet’s incorporation into the Chinese state: that did not happen in Qing times.

In the nineteenth century the Qing court, to head off British influence over Tibet from Britain’s base in India, proclaimed that it was responsible for Tibet’s foreign relations. In the mid-nineteenth century the Manchu court’s two Imperial Residents (Amban) in Lhasa were ignored by the British and the heads of various Indian states as Britain succeeded in taking over management of Tibet’s foreign relations. The country was opened to trade from India. That

10 might have appeared again to orient the country away from Mongolia and China, toward India and the south, as it had been oriented a thousand years earlier, during the period of its greatest cultural development. That did not happen, although by the end of the twentieth century, with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama a refugee resident in India, Tibet had become the subject of international concern.

Closer to China, however, the northeastern Tibetan or Amdo Tibet region in the late nineteenth century was made a province, called Qinghai, and placed under direct (if administratively limited) control of officials appointed from Beijing. After 1928 the entire eastern Tibet region was divided into the two provinces of Qinghai and Xikang. Tibet Proper, all that is labelled Tibet on modern maps, nonetheless remained autonomous. From the Revolution of 1911, the Republican government of China continued the Qing claim to be responsible for Tibet’s foreign relations, to which it added the claim that Tibet is an integral part of China in terms of modern international law; it did not, however, set up any Chinese government within Tibet. That did not happen until after the Chinese army’s invasion after 1949 and the flight of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama to India in 1959. Chinese control, something previously found not feasible, or perhaps traditionally not held to be highly desirable, was in the end accomplished by modern military force.

Chapter 34: The as Man and Ruler Section IV: Military Campaigns and Border Policies The Dzungar Wars (pp. 901-902)

On the far northwestern fringe of the Qing empire, the Dzungar federation of the Western (Oyirat, Eleuth) Mongols was again active. After their great founding ruler Galdan’s death in 1697, his nephew Tsewang Araptan (1643- 1727) came on the scene; he gradually pulled the fragmented Dzungar state together and, leading a powerful resurgence, expanded its boundaries. He invaded Tibet in 1716-17, causing great devastation and arousing the resentment of the Dalai Lama; it was the Dzungar leader’s intention to supersede both rival Mongols and the Qing state in establishing his control over the Qinghai region that borders both and northeast Tibet. His planned takeover of Xining, the principal city of Qinghai, was thwarted when the Kangxi emperor in 1719 sent his fourteenth son, Prince Yinti, at the head of a large army to garrison Xining. That army was backed up by General Nian Genghao, based in adjoining Sichuan Province. Thus all the elements were again in place for what had become the classic confrontation between northwest Mongols (whether Dzungars or Koshuts or others of the Oyirat federation) and China over dominance in Tibet.

The Yongzheng emperor inherited that tense situation when he came to the throne in 1722. Prince Yinti, his rival for the Qing throne, was recalled to

11 Beijing and played no further part in the military action that was to ensue, but Qing armies continued to hold their ground in Xining and deny the Dzungars control over the strategic Qinghai region. Tsewang Araptan died in 1727, leaving his throne to his son (d. 1750). This able military leader became the Manchus’ troublesome foe in the northwest; he had to decide how far to go in challenging the Qing state for control over Tibet. The Manchu emperor decided to pre-empt the Dzungar ruler; his new Grand Council was created to expedite the supervision of his Dzungar campaigns.

Neither side was able to bring off a decisive victory. In 1731 the Manchus suffered a disastrous defeat and were saved only by the intervention of a further contingent of Mongol banner forces. A truce was agreed upon in 1732 and renewed under the Qianlong emperor in 1738, after which peace reigned in Dzungaria until the 1750s. The final showdown over control in Tibet, possession of Qinghai, the Qing presence in Muslim Turkic southern Xinjiang, and Dzungaria itself was postponed until the Qianlong emperor in the 1750s launched the war that finally eliminated Dzungar power. The Yongzheng emperor’s military intervention sustained the Qing claim to Xinjiang which the Kangxi emperor had for the first time attempted to add to the Qing (Manchu/Chinese) empire, but left the conclusive steps to be taken by his successor later in the eighteenth century.

Chapter 35: Splendor and Degeneration, 1735-1799 Section VI: The Qianlong Emperor’s Military Campaigns The Gurkha Campaigns of 1790-1792 (pp. 937-939)

The Gurkha wars display the Qing court’s continuing sensitivity to conditions in Tibet. Having destroyed the Dzungars and eliminated that threat to their influence over the Dalai Lamas and the Yellow Sect of Tibetan Buddhism in the 1750s, the Manchu rulers gained uncontested sponsorship of the religious leaders (who simultaneously were the secular rulers) in Tibet. Then in the 1760s a new set of circumstances evolved on the southern borders of Tibet. The new elements were, first, the creation of a strong state in Nepal, on the southern borders of Tibet, and second, the involvement in the region of a new foreign power, the British, through their East India Company, based in northern India.

Nepal is a long, narrow upland plateau on the southern flank of the Himalayas, extending 500 miles east to west, and centering on the valley of Katmandu. It lies between Tibet on the north, across the crest of the Himalayan range, and northeast India to its south. It had not been strongly organized as a unified state before the 1760s, when the king of the small state of Gurkha conquered the entire region, moved his capital to Katmandu in 1768, and commenced further expansion on all sides. The Gurkha rulers were Hindus, but the largely Buddhist Nepalese population had strong religious ties to southern Tibet. Main

12 routes of trade from Patna in the Indian state of Bihar entered the Katmandu valley via the Gandak River route, then crossed mountain passes into southern Tibet, where the nearest cities were Gyantse and Shigatse, on the way to Lhasa.

Immediately adjacent to Shigatse is the great monastery of Tashilhunpo, in the eighteenth century the seat of the Panchen Lamas. They were second to the Dalai Lamas in the hierarchy of the Gelup-ka sect of Tibetan Buddhism, and were figures of very great prestige and influence, often assuming authority after the death of a Dalai Lama and helping to determine his successor, and otherwise potentially important in secular as well as religious affairs. The remarkable incumbent in the 1760s was the Third (1738-1780). He spoke Hindi, corresponded in Persian, was friendly with agents of the British East India Company in India and with Catholic missionaries in Tibet. He was invited to Beijing in 1780 for the celebrations of the Qianlong emperor’s seventieth (sui) birthday. There the court took special note of him, having heard about his cosmopolitan connections; they loaded him down with rich gifts and attached aides to his entourage. He would bear watching. Sadly, he contracted in China and died in Beijing at the age of forty-two.

The Nepalese rulers were also in contact with the East India Company’s Governor General in Calcutta and with the Company’s agents in the region. When the rash rulers of Nepal decided to invade southern Tibet in 1788, they probably thought they would have British backing; the British saw Nepal as a doorway for trade into Tibet, and via Tibet on into west China, and had discussed common interests with the Gurkha leaders. Mediation by the Panchen Lamas was no longer possible following the death of the amiable Third in 1780, leaving his reincarnate successor, a young child.

The two Manchu resident agents in Lhasa () made no attempt to defend the region against the invaders. They took the child Panchen (along with the Dalai Lama) to safety when the Nepalese troops came through and plundered the rich monastery at Shigatse on their way to attack Lhasa. The Manchu agents’ only interest was to protect the two Buddhist religious leaders, not to defend the Tibetan state, nor had they military or diplomatic means to do so. As the affair was reported in urgent dispatches to Beijing, alien powers had designs on the region and on its spiritual leaders. Manchu control over Tibet and its religious influence throughout Inner Asia again appeared to be threatened, but from an entirely new quarter.

Those are the circumstances that underlay the Qianlong emperor’s urgent decision to dispatch an army, made up of Manchu and Mongol forces supplemented by tribal soldiers supplied by the native chieftainships, to drive the Nepalese out of southern Tibet. Upon hearing of the first Nepalese incursions in 1788-89, the emperor commanded forces from Sichuan to proceed to Lhasa and restore order. That measure, by no means a simple logistical feat, was counted as the first of two wars with the Gurkhas. It

13 appeared to have been successful, but the commanders lied about conditions, hoping to conceal the true state of affairs: they found that the marauding Gurkha forces had already withdrawn, and no “suppression” was accomplished. Reports conintued to come to Beijing saying that the Gurkha armies had again invaded; in 1791 they returned in force. This time the emperor ordered those officers responsible for the previous effort punished, and selected more reliable military leaders to undertake a decisive operation. Fukang’an, a Manchu related to the emperor, was an able but unscrupulous military commander; he took as his second in command Hailancha, perhaps the best military tactician in the Qing armies. They chose to enter Tibet from Xining (Qinghai) in the north, shortening the march but making it in the dead of winter 1791-92, crossing high mountain passes in deep snow and cold. Their entire force probably did not exceed 10,000, about 6,000 Manchus and Mongols along with units made up of Tibetan soldiers from the native chieftainships in China’s northwest. They reached central Tibet in the summer of 1792 and within two or three months could report to Beijing that they had won a decisive series of encounters that pushed the warlike Gurkha armies across the crest of the Himalayas and back into the valley of Katmandu. That allowed the Qianlong emperor to produce his essay on his “ten perfections” late in 1792, although his armies fought on in Nepal into 1793, when, virtually at the gates of Katmandu, Fukang’an forced the battered Gurkha armies to accept surrender on Manchu terms. By claiming two victories over the Gurkhas, the emperor rounded out his list of ten triumphs, but in fact only the expedition under Fukang’an and Hailancha in 1791-1793 can be counted as a military victory.

Victory over the Gurkhas in 1793 did not prevent repeated Nepalese incursions thereafter; in the mid-1850s the Tibetans defeated and expelled a Gurkha invasion without informing the Manchu Amban, and negotiated a peace treaty without Beijing’s knowledge. The Chinese position in Tibet under the Qianlong emperor was seen by the British as “suzerainty”, like that which China claimed over many of its neighboring countries such as Korea, , and Siam. Suzerainty implies that the Manchu-Chinese court claimed a kind of distant overlordship under which the “vassal state” retained full sovereignty. That rhetoric of empire in fact acknowledged the independence of states while claiming a nominal superiority over them. The two resident Manchu Ambans who represented the Qing emperors at the court of the Dalai Lamas in Lhasa had no role in governing the people of Tibet, nor authority to appoint or approve the Tibetan administrators; their functions, in their roles as personal representatives of the Manchu emperors, were limited to influencing the Dalai Lamas and other heads of the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy, who had become de facto clients of the Manchu emperors. That is to say, the rulers in Beijing expected the Tibetan church to uphold policies that would not be inimical to China’s interests in Inner Asia. As for the new links of Nepal with British India, the Chinese court was made aware that the British threatened their position in Tibet; they demanded that the Dalai Lamas prevent all commercial penetration by the British East India Company and relations

14 with all European powers, thereby closing Tibet to British (and later to Russian) influence. In that they succeeded for most of a century. Those were the limited goals of Qing foreign policy vis-à-vis Tibet. The Gurkha wars reveal the limits of that relationship.

15