The Tibetan language is generally considered to be a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
In general, the history of Tibet begins with the reign of Songtsän
Gampo (604–650 CE). Tibet continued as a Central Asian empire
until the late 9th century.
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 religion among Mongols and Tibetans.
Genden Drub, 1st Dalai Lama (1391 – 1474)According to a Chinese
source, the sixth Dalai Lama enjoyed a lifestyle that included
drinking, the company of women, and writing love songs. Declaring
him to be unworthy as a monk, Mongol leader Lha-bzang Khan invaded
Tibet with the approval of China's Kangxi emperor in 1705. According
to this claim, the Kangxi emperor dismissed him (the sixth Dalai
Lama) from office and ordered him brought to Beijing for questioning.
He died soon afterwards on the way to Beijing in 1706. According
to this same Chinese source, the Qing Emperor put Amdo under Qing
government's direct rule in 1724, and incorporated east Kham into
neighbouring Chinese provinces in 1728. 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
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
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 Tibet except through the
intermediary of the Chinese Government." The Qing central government
established direct rule over Tibet for the first time in 1910.
The 13th Dalai Lama fled to British India in February 1910. The same month, the Chinese Qing government issued a proclamation deposing the Dalai Lama and instigating the search for a new incarnation.[18] 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 it would not
intervene between China and Tibet and would only recognize the
de facto government of China within Tibet at this time.[19] Bell,
in his history of Tibet, wrote 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 1912 the Qing Dynasty Emperor abdicated and the new Republic of China was formed. In April 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 its new Tibetan representative, but the Tibetans were in favour of having all of the Chinese troops return to China.
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 signed a treaty proclaiming mutual recognition and their independence from China. However, the validity of such a treaty is disputed by historians and diplomats.[22] In 1914, representatives of China, Tibet and Britain negotiated a treaty in India: 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[23] and affirming the latter's status as part of Chinese territory. Tibetan representatives secretly signed under British pressure; however, the representative of China's 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 Chinese Civil War 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 mo
Rule of the People's Republic of China The 9th Panchen
Lama (1883–1937)Neither the Republic of China nor the People's
Republic of China have 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 the 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 their masters
formed only a small part of Tibetan society, and argued that Tibet
would have modernized itself without China's intervention. However,
the Chinese government claims that most Tibetans were still serfs
in 1951, and have proclaimed that the Tibetan government inhibited
the development of Tibet during its self-rule from 1913 to 1959,
and opposed any modernization efforts proposed by the Chinese
government. 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 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 had fled to
India after the failed Tibetan uprising in 1959, and they 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 of the most
important, religiously or culturally, monasteries remained without
major damage according to the Chinese source. And hundreds of
thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns were forced to return to
secular life. Some were even imprisoned or killed.
In 1989, the Panchen Lama was finally allowed to return to Shigatse,
where he addressed a crowd of 30,000. He described what he saw
as the suffering of Tibet under the rule of the PRC in terms reminiscent
of the petition he had presented to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai
in 1962, after which, he was imprisoned from 1968 to 1977, in
which he had documented terrible living conditions faced by the
people of Tibet, the deaths of the captured Tibetan rebellers
in forced labour camps, and the harm being done to his country
in the name of socialist reform. Five days later, he died of a
massive heart attack at the age of 50. The Dalai Lama and the
PRC subsequently recognised different reincarnations of The Panchen
Lama. While officially an atheist state, the PRC has affirmed
its right to conf 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 ball. 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 Chinese government
claimed that this selecting system was published as a regulation
in Tibet in 1793. They also claimed that from 1804 to 1877 all
the Dalai lamas and Panchen lamas were selected with either the
Tibetan traditional system with approval from the Chinese government
or with this system.) 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, just as 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 the PRC rule. Foreigners can visit most parts of Tibet, and it is claimed 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 reports of human rights violation in Tibet by human rights group such as Human Rights Watch. All governments, however, recognize the PRC's sovereignty over Tibet, and none have recognized the Government of Tibet in Exile in India.
Evaluation by the Tibetan exile community
The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile in Dharamsala, 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 Tibetans
were not able to process the data well enough to produce a credible
total. There were, however, many casualties, with a figure of
400,000 extrapolated from a calculation Warren W. Smith made from
census reports of Tibet which show 200,000 "missing" from Tibet.
Even The Black Book of Communism expresses doubt at the 1.2 million
figure, but does note that according to the 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. The Dalai Lama has stated his willingness to negotiate with China for genuine autonomy, although he still refutes China's claims that Tibet was not once an independent country. Some exile Tibetans however, still call for full Tibetan 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. Tibetan 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 Tibetan Government and the Dalai Lama would have worked to improve the material lot of the people and their political rights.
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 lagging behind neighbouring provinces.
Policies were changed, and since then the central government's
policy in Tibet has claimed to have granted most religious freedoms.
However, monks and nuns are still imprisoned, and many Tibetans
continue to flee Tibet. At the same time, many Tibetan exiles
view projects that the PRC claims to have benefitted Tibet, such
as the China Western Development economic plan or the Qinghai-Tibet
Railway, are actually politically-motivated actions to consolidate
central control over Tibet by facilitating militarization and
Han migration while benefit only a few Tibetans. Tibetan exiles
also view the money funneled into cultural restoration projects
as being primarily aimed at purely attracting foreign tourists.
They also claim that Tibet is still lagging behind the rest of
the PRC. Citing for example, that the first large hospital in
Tibet was not built until 1985, that several of Lhasa's main roads
were not paved until 1987 and that the first students at Tibet
University did not graduate until 1988. They
also claim that there is still preferential treatment awarded
to the Han Chinese population of the TAR in the labour market
as opposed to Tibetans.
Evaluation by the People's Republic of China
The government of the PRC maintains that the Tibetan Government did almost nothing to improve the Tibetans' material and political standard of life during its rule from 1913-1959, and that they opposed any reforms proposed by the Chinese government.[50] According to the Chinese government's claim, this is the reason for the tension that grew between some Chinese officials and the Tibetan government in 1959. [51] The government of the PRC maintains that the population of Tibet in 1737 was about 8 million , and that due to the backward rule of the local theocracy, there was a rapid decrease during the following two centuries eventually resulting in a population of only about 1.19 million in 1959. Today, the population of Greater Tibet is 7.3 million, of which, according to the 2000 census, six 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 claims 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, hence exaggerating the number of non-Tibetans.
The government of the PRC also rejects claims that the lives of
Tibetans have deteriorated, and claims that the lives of Tibetans
have been improved immensely compared to self rule before 1950.
Benefits that are commonly quoted include - the GDP of the (TAR)
today is thirty times that of before 1950, Workers in Tibet have
the second highest wages in China, the TAR has 22,500 km of highways,
as opposed to none in 1950, all secular education in the TAR was
created after the revolution, the TAR now has 25 scientific research
institutes as opposed to none 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 1980's for the maintainance
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.
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