A History of Tibet

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The Tibetan language is generally considered to be a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan language family, distantly related to Chinese (Sinitic languages).

In general, the history of Tibet begins with King Srong-tsan-gam-po Songtsen Gampo (604–650 CE), although there were 27 kings before him. King Songtsen Gampo is generally considered to have introduced Buddhism to Tibet at this time. Christianity is known to have been present in Tibetan regions prior to 782.

King Songtsen Gampo sought to marry Princess Wen-Cheng, a member of the extended royal family of the Chinese Tang Dynasty. He was also married to Princess Brikhuti, a Nepalese (newari) princess who is credited with bringing the statue of Shakyamuni Buddha that is now found in the Jokhang.

Conflict between Tibet and the Tang began as Tu Yu Hun was against the marriage. Tibet sent an army to drive it from the valleys around the source of Huang He (Yellow River). After the Tang general Hou Jun Ji drove the Tibetans out of Songzhou, the Tang government became receptive and marriage took place in 641.

The next Tang emperor sent General Xue Ren Gui with an army to recover Tu Yu Hun for the southern part of Qinghai (Amdo in Tibetan). A Tibetan army defeated him on the high plateau of Qinghai. Subsequently, Tibet conquered all small tribes in Qinghai and southern Xinjiang.

During this period, Tibet had a population of 10 million with 3 million Tibetans as an army of comparable strength facing the two Tang armies of Southern Xinjiang (24,000 soldiers) and of the Silk Road (75,000 soldiers). Disputes involved trade controls. Tibet wanted the four Tang garrisons at the Southern Xinjiang (which guarded the silk-road from central Tang through Xinjiang and Central Asia). After the Tang's withdrawal of the Silk-road army and its garrison troops of Northern and Southern Xinjiang during the An Lu Shan rebellion, Tubo (Tibetan) military power conquered all of that territory up to the border of the Hue-He (Mongols), capturing the Silk-road.

Tibet had also conquered the ethnic tribes scattered in the present areas of Lijiang and Dali, Yunnan, and had established a military administration in northwest Yunnan. Yunnan was a tributary of Tibet. Tibet also bordered with India, and Persia. This was the largest area which was ever controlled by Tibet.

The military route used by the Tibetans to reach Yunnan was closely related to the contemporary tea and horse route. Cha Ma Gu Dao (“Tea and Horse Caravan Road”) of Southwest China is less well known than the famous Silk Road.

According to the Tibetan book Historic Collection of the Han and Tibet (Han Zang Shi Ji) “In the reign of the Tibetan King Chidusongzan [Khri ‘Dus sron] (676-704), the Tibetan aristocracy started to drink tea and use the tea-bowl, and tea was classified into different categories.”

After the downfall of the Tibetan Dynasty, the Tang recovered the Silk-road (848). According to one study, more than 20,000 warhorses per year were exchanged for tea during the Northern Song (960-1127) dynasty.

The distinctive form of Tibetan society, in which land was divided into three different types of holding—estates of noble families, freeheld lands and estates held by monasteries of particular Tibetan Buddhist sects—arose after the weakening of the Tibetan kings in the 10th century. This form of society was to continue into the 1950s, although Tibetans themselves claim that this is not an accurate description and that Tibetans consist of many different background and not just monks, masters, and serfs.

Mongols & Manchus
In 1240, the Mongols marched into central Tibet and attacked several monasteries. Köden, younger brother of Mongol ruler Güyük Khan, participated in a ceremony recognizing the Sa-skya lama as temporal ruler of Tibet in 1247. The Mongol khans had ruled northern China since 1215. They were the emperors of the Yuan Dynasty. Kublai Khan was a patron of Tibetan Buddhism and appointed the Sa-skya Lama his "Imperial preceptor," or chief religious official. Tibetans viewed this relationship as an example of yon-mchod, or priest-patron relationship. In practice, the Sa-skya lama was subordinate to the Mongol khan. The collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 led to the overthrow of the Sa-skya in Tibet. Tibet was then ruled by a succession of three secular dynasties. In the 16th century, Altan Khan of Tumet Mongolian tribe supported the Dalai Lama's religious lineage to be the dominant.

Beginning in the early 18th century, the Qing government sent a resident commissioner (amban) to Lhasa. Tibetan factions rebelled in 1750 and killed the ambasa. Then, a Qing army entered and defeated the rebels and installed an administration headed by the Dalai Lama. The number of soldiers in Tibet was kept at about 2000. The defensive duties were partly helped out by a local force which was reorganized by the resident commissioner, and the Tibetan government continued to manage day-to-day affairs as before.

British influence
Main article: British expedition to Tibet

In 1904 a British diplomatic mission, accompanied by a large military escort, forced its way through to Lhasa. The head of the diplomatic mission was Colonel Francis Younghusband. The principal motivation for the British mission was a fear, which proved to be unfounded, that Russia was extending its footprint into Tibet and possibly even giving military aid to the Tibetan government. But in his way to Lhasa, Younghusband killed 1300 tibetans in Gyam-Tse (as written in "The Great Game" of Peter Hopkirk), because the natives were in fear of what kind of unequal treaty the English would offer to the Tibetans. Some documents claims it is 5000 tibetans was killed by British army. When the mission reached Lhasa, the Dalai Lama had already fled to Urga in Mongolia, but a treaty was signed by lay and ecclesiastical officials of the Tibetan government, and by representatives of the three monasteries of Sera, Drepung, and Ganden. The treaty made provisions for the frontier between Sikkim and Tibet to be respected, for freer trade between British and Tibetan subjects, and for an indemnity to be paid from the Tibetan Government to the British Government for its expenses in dispatching armed troops to Lhasa. It also made provision for a British trade agent to reside at the trade mart at Gyantse. The provisions of this 1904 treaty were confirmed in a 1906 treaty signed between Britain and China, in which the British also agreed "not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in the administration of Tibet.".The position of British Trade Agent at Gyantse was occupied from 1904 up until 1944. It was not until 1937, with the creation of the position of "Head of British Mission Lhasa", that a British officer had a permanent posting in Lhasa itself.

A Nepalese agency had also been established in Lhasa after the invasion of Tibet by the Gurkha government of Nepal in 1855.

In the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1906 which confirmed the Anglo-Tibetan Treaty of 1904, Britain agreed "not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in the administration of Tibet" while China engaged "not to permit any other foreign State to interfere with the territory or internal administration of Tibet". In the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, Britain also recognized the "suzerainty of China over Thibet" and, in conformity with such admitted principle, engaged "not to enter into negotiations with Thibet except through the intermediary of the Chinese Government." The Qing central government established direct rule over Tibet for the first time in 1910. The thirteenth Dalai Lama fled to British India in February 1910. In the same month, the Chinese Qing government issued a proclamation deposing the Dalai Lama and instigating the search for a new incarnation. While in India the Dalai Lama became a close friend of the British Political Officer Charles Bell. The official position of the British Government was that they would not intervene between China and Tibet, and it would only recognize the de facto government of China within Tibet at this time. In Bell's history of Tibet, he would write of this time that "the Tibetans were abandoned to Chinese aggression, an aggression for which the British Military Expedition to Lhasa and subsequent retreat [and consequent power vacuum within Tibet] were primarily responsible".

Relations with the Republic of China
In February of 1912 the Qing Dynasty Emperor abdicated and the new Republic of China was formed. In April of 1912 the Chinese garrison of troops in Lhasa surrendered to the Tibetan authorities. The new Chinese Republican government wished to make the commander of the Chinese troops in Lhasa their new Tibetan representative, but the Tibetans were in favour of having all of the Chinese troops return to China Proper. The Dalai Lama returned to Tibet from India in July 1912. By the end of 1912, the Chinese troops in Tibet had returned, via India, to China Proper. In 1913, Tibet and Mongolia allegedly signed a treaty proclaiming mutual recognition and their independence from China. However, the validity of such a treaty is disputed by historians and diplomats. In 1914, a treaty was negotiated in India by representatives of China, Tibet and Britain: the Simla Convention. During the convention, the British tried to divide Tibet into Inner and Outer Tibet. When negotiations broke down over the specific boundary between Inner and Outer, the British demanded instead to advance their line of control, enabling them to annex 90,000 square kilometers of traditional Tibetan territory in southern Tibet, which corresponds to most of the modern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, while recognizing Chinese suzerainty over Tibet and affirming the latter's status as part of Chinese territory. Tibetan representatives secretly signed under British pressure; however, the representative of Chinese central government declared that the secretive annexation of territory was not acceptable. The boundary established in the convention, the McMahon Line, was considered by the British and later the independent Indian government to be the boundary; however, the Chinese view since then has been that since China, which was sovereign over Tibet, did not sign the treaty, the treaty was meaningless, and the annexation and control of southern Tibet Arunachal Pradesh by India is illegal. This paved the way to the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and the boundary dispute between China and India today.

The subsequent outbreak of World War I and civil war in China caused the Western powers and the infighting factions of China proper to lose interest in Tibet, and the 13th Dalai Lama ruled undisturbed. At that time, the government of Tibet controlled all of Ü-Tsang (Dbus-gtsang) and western Kham (Khams), roughly coincident with the borders of Tibet Autonomous Region today. Eastern Kham, separated by the Yangtze River was under the control of Chinese warlord Liu Wenhui. The situation in Amdo (Qinghai) was more complicated, with the Xining area controlled by ethnic Hui warlord Ma Bufang, who constantly strove to exert control over the rest of Amdo (Qinghai).

Rule of the People's Republic of China

Chinese police before Potala Palace in Lhasa.Neither the Republic of China nor the People's Republic of China has ever renounced China's claim to sovereignty over Tibet.In 1950, the People's Liberation Army invaded the Tibetan area of Chamdo, crushing minimal resistance from the ill-equipped Tibetan army. In 1951, the Tibetan representatives, under PLA military pressure, signed a seventeen-point agreement with PRC's Central People's Government affirming China's sovereignty over Tibet. The agreement was ratified in Lhasa a few months later.

Though some of the population of Tibet at that time were serfs ("mi ser"), often bound to land owned by monasteries and aristocrats, Tibetans in exile have claimed that the Serfs and Masters formed only a small part of Tibetan society, and argued that Tibet would have modernized itself without China's intervention. This agreement was initially put into effect in Tibet proper. However, Eastern Kham and Amdo were outside the administration of the government of Tibet, and were thus treated like any other Chinese province with land redistribution implemented in full. As a result, a rebellion broke out in Amdo and eastern Kham in June of 1956. The insurrection, supported by the American CIA, eventually spread to Lhasa. It was crushed by 1959. During this campaign, tens of thousands of Tibetans were killed. The 14th Dalai Lama and other government principals fled to exile in India, but isolated resistance continued in Tibet until 1969 when the CIA abruptly withdrew its support.

Although the Panchen Lama remained a virtual prisoner, the Chinese set him as a figurehead in Lhasa, claiming that he headed the legitimate Government of Tibet since the Dalai Lama has fled to India after the failed Tibetan uprising in 1959, and established him as the traditional head of the Tibetan government. In 1965, the area that had been under the control of the Dalai Lama's government from the 1910s to 1959 (U-Tsang and western Kham) was set up as an Autonomous Region. The monastic estates were broken up and secular education introduced. During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Red Guards inflicted a campaign of organized vandalism against cultural sites in the entire PRC, including Tibet's Buddhist heritage. Some young Tibetans joined in the campaign of destruction, voluntarily due to the ideological fervour that was sweeping the entire PRC and involuntarily due to the fear of being denounced as "enemies of the people". Of the several thousand monasteries in Tibet, over 6,500 were destroyed, only a handful remained without major damage, and hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns were killed or imprisoned.

In 1989, the Panchen Lama mysteriously died, just as his open condemnation of Chinese policies intensified. The Dalai Lama and the PRC recognised different reincarnations. While officially an atheist state, the People's Republic of China has affirmed its right to confirming high-level reincarnations, a tulku in the Tibetan tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism, citing a precedent set by the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty (The PRC view is that Qianlong instituted a system of selecting the Panchen Lama, the Dalai Lama and other high lamas by means of a lottery which utilised a golden urn with names wrapped in barley balls; the view of Tibetan exiles is that the system was a suggestion made by Qianlong and was not a prerequisite for choosing the Panchen Lama). The Dalai Lama named 6 year old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th Panchen Lama but without confirmation by the vase lot, while the PRC named another child, Gyancain Norbu by the vase lot. Gyancain Norbu was raised in Beijing and has appeared occasionally on state media. The PRC-selected Panchen Lama is rejected by Tibetan exile groups who commonly refer to him as the "Panchen Zuma" (literally "fake Panchen Lama"). Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family have gone missing, into imprisonment according to Tibetan exiles, and under a hidden identity for protection and privacy according to the PRC.

Since 1979, there have been major economic changes, like the rest of the PRC, but the political system remains undemocratic and repressive. Some PRC policies in Tibet have been described as moderate, while others are judged to be more oppressive. Most religious freedoms have been officially restored, provided the lamas do not challenge PRC rule. Foreigners can visit most parts of Tibet, and it is claimed [citation needed] that the less savoury aspects of PRC rule are kept hidden from visitors.

The PRC continues to portray its rule over Tibet as an unalloyed improvement, and foreign governments continue to make occasional protests about aspects of PRC rule in Tibet because of frequent report of human rights violation in Tibet by Human rights group such as Human rights watch (hrw.org). All governments, however, recognize PRC sovereignty over Tibet, and none has recognized the Dalai Lama's government in exile in India.

Evaluation by the Tibetan exile community

A Tibetan refugee market in Ladakh, India.
The Central Tibetan Administration states that the number that have died in the much unwanted Great Leap Forward, of violence, or other indirect causes since 1950 is approximately 1.2 million, which the Chinese Communist Party denies. The official toll of deaths recorded for the whole of China for the years of the Great Leap Forward is 14 million, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million. According to Patrick French, the estimate of 1.2 million in Tibet is not reliable because the Tibetans were not able to process the data well enough to produce a credible total. There were, however, many casualties, perhaps as many as 400,000. This figure is extrapolated from a calculation Warren W. Smith made from census reports of Tibet which show 200,000 "missing" from Tibet. Even the right wing and often misleading The Black Book of Communism expresses doubt at the 1.2 million figure, but does note that according to Chinese census the total population of ethnic Tibetans in the PRC was 2.8 million in 1953, but only 2.5 million in 1964. It puts forward a figure of 800,000 deaths and alleges that as many as 10% of Tibetans were interned, with few survivors. Chinese demographers have estimated that 90,000 of the 300,000 "missing" Tibetans fled the region.

The government of Tibet in Exile also says that, fundamentally, the issue is that of the right to self-determination of the Tibetan people. While refusing to agree to China's demands that he renounce the idea that Tibet was once an independent country, the Dalai Lama has stated his willingness to negotiate with China for "genuine autonomy" (over the objection of those Tibetans who push for full independence). The Dalai Lama sees the millions of Han immigrants, attracted to the TAR by economic incentives and preferential socioeconomic policies, as presenting an urgent threat to the Tibetan nation by diluting the Tibetans both culturally and through intermarriage. Exile groups say that despite recent attempts to restore the appearance of original Tibetan culture to attract tourism, the traditional Tibetan way of life is now irrevocably changed. Supporters of the Dalai Lama argue that comparisons between the theocracy before 1950 and the Tibet of today are false because, if China had not invaded, the Dalai Lama would have worked to improve the material lot of the people, their political rights, and in doing so has disturbed the natural process of a legitimate nation.

It is reported that when Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, visited Lhasa in 1980 he was unhappy when he found out the region was behind neighbouring provinces. Policies were changed, and since then the central government's policy in Tibet has granted most religious freedoms. But monks and nuns are still sometimes imprisoned, and many Tibetans (mostly monks and nuns) continue to flee Tibet yearly. At the same time, many Tibetans view projects that the PRC claims to benefit Tibet, such as the China Western Development economic plan or the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, as politically-motivated actions to consolidate central control over Tibet by facilitating militarization and Han migration while benefiting few Tibetans; they also view the money funneled into cultural restoration projects as being aimed at attracting foreign tourists. They note that Tibet is still behind the rest of the PRC: for example, the first big hospital in Tibet was not built until 1985; that several of Lhasa's main roads weren't paved until 1987; and that the first students at Tibet University didn't graduate until 1988. They also say that there is still preferential treatment awarded to Han in the labor market as opposed to Tibetans.

Evaluation by the People's Republic of China

Operational since July 2006.The government of the PRC says that the population of Tibet in 1737 was about 8 million , and that due to the backward rule of the local theocracy, there was rapid decrease in the next two hundred years and the population in 1959 was only about 1.19 million. Today, the population of Greater Tibet is 7.3 million, of which, according to the 2000 census, 6 million are ethnic Tibetans. The government of the PRC views this population growth as the result of the abolition of the theocracy and the introduction of a modern, higher standard of living. Based on the census numbers, the PRC also rejects claims that the Tibetans are being swamped by Han Chinese; instead the PRC says that the border for Greater Tibet drawn by the government of Tibet in Exile is so large that it incorporates regions such as Xining that were never traditionally Tibetan in the first place, hence exaggerating the number of non-Tibetans.

The government of the PRC also rejects claims that the lives of Tibetans have deteriorated, pointing to rights enjoyed by the Tibetan language in education and in courts and says that the lives of Tibetans have been improved immensely compared to the Dalai Lama's rule before 1950. Benefits that are commonly quoted include: the GDP of Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) today is 30 times that before 1950; Workers in Tibet has the second highest wages in China; TAR has 22,500 km of highways, as opposed to 0 in 1950; all secular education in TAR was created after the revolution; TAR now has 25 scientific research institutes as opposed to 0 in 1950; infant mortality has dropped from 43% in 1950 to 0.661% in 2000; life expectancy has risen from 35.5 years in 1950 to 67 in 2000; the collection and publishing of the traditional Epic of King Gesar, which is the longest epic poem in the world and had only been handed down orally before; allocation of 300 million Renminbi since the 1980s to the maintenance and protection of Tibetan monasteries. The Cultural Revolution and the cultural damage it wrought upon the entire PRC is generally condemned as a nationwide catastrophe, whose main instigators (in the PRC's view, the Gang of Four) have been brought to justice and whose reoccurrence is unthinkable in an increasingly modernized China. The China Western Development plan is viewed by the PRC as a massive, benevolent, and patriotic undertaking by the wealthier eastern coast to help the western parts of China, including Tibet, catch up in prosperity and living standards.