History

Tibet is an inalienable part of the motherland. So the Chinese Governments would have you believe. However, history would strongly suggest otherwise.

Tibet is one of the oldest nations on Earth, tracing the founding of their State to the foundation of the Yarlung (Tubo) Dynasty in 127 BCE. The palace of the first Tibetan King, supposedly the first permanent building erected in Tibet was erected in that year and stood until the 1960's when it was razed to its foundations by fanatical Red Guards. It has since been rebuilt using traditional methods and materials but tourists should not be fooled into believing that the building they see is the original structure.

The Tibetan Kings expanded their power to encompass a vast area, including Ladakh, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Eastern Turkestan, and large areas of modern China, becoming the major power in Central Asia and the biggest threat to Tang Dynasty China.

In the 7th Century, the 33rd King, Songsten Gampo, was powerful enough to demand, and receive, two foreign wives - first was Princess Brikuti Devi of Nepal, and later the Princess Wen Cheng of China's Tang Dynasty. Both Princesses were devout Buddhists and brought with them in their dowries, highly venerated images, and built temples to house them. The Nepalese Princess built Tibet's most famous shrine, the Jokhang in Central Lhasa - indeed the city itself was built around it. Nepalese architects were used and its doors face South, towards Nepal. The Chinese Princess built the nearby Ramoche temple to house her image, the Jowo. The doors of Ramoche face East, towards China. Some 200 years later, the images traded temples, the Jowo moving to the Jokhang where it remains to this day. The Nepalese image was discovered, cut in two, on a Beijing rubbish dump, ready to be melted down for scrap after Ramoche was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. With their usual ignorance of history, the Chinese mistakenly believed that because it housed the Nepalese image, it was not the temple built by Wen Cheng.

The power of the Tubo Kingdom continued to grow, with Tibet invading China, sacking the Capital Chang'an, and installing a puppet Emperor for a time. The border wars resulted in the Peace Treaty of 822, immortalised in 3 stone pillars - one placed outside the Chinese Imperial Palace in Chang'an, one on the border between Tibet and China, and the third outside the Jokhang in Lhasa where it still stands, although it is surrounded by a wall so that it can no longer be read. It states that henceforth "Tibetans will be happy in the land of Tibet, Chinese will be happy in the land of China."

Under the reign of King Trisong Detsen, Buddhism became the official State religion of Tibet and the first Monastery (Samye) was founded by the banks of the Tsangpo River by the great Indian mystic Padmasambhava.

The Tubo Kingdom effectively ended with the reign of Lang Dharma who followed the native Bon religion and persecuted Buddhism until he was assassinated outside the Jokhang by a disguised Buddhist monk. Tibet would never again be ruled by a native King and it would take until the arrival of Atisha in the 11th Century before Buddhism itself would recover in Tibet. From that time on, it is impossible to talk about Tibet without talking about Buddhism as one sect or another fought for supremacy, Tibet was henceforth ruled by religious leaders.

As war had been renounced as an article of foreign policy, Tibet's leaders realised that in order to maintain their fiercely cherished independence, foreign patronage was necessary and the leaders of the Sakya clan sought to establish such patronage with Central Asia's greatest rising power, the Mongols. The Priest-Patron (Cho-Yon) relationship provided for a military protection of Tibet in return for spiritual guidance from Tibetan religious leaders. Tibet thus placed itself under the protection of the Mongols and nominally became part of the Mongol Empire, although they were never directly administered by the Mongols and always remained administratively seperate from the rest of the Empire. At this time, the Mongols had not yet conquered China's Sung Dynasty - this was achieved by Kublai Khan who moved his capital to Beijing and founded the Yuan Dynasty. The Chinese always considered the Mongols to be hated foreigners who refused them high administrative posts, to be overthrown as soon as possible after the death of Kublai. Yet it is this time that China points to as the moment when Tibet officially became part of China. Tibet disassociated itself from the Mongol Empire prior to the fall of the Yuan Dynasty and the founding of China's native Ming Dynasty. So Tibet entered the Mongol Dynasty before China, and left it before the Chinese overthrew it. For China to base a claim on Tibet on this premise is the same as Australia claiming that Canada is an inalienable part of Australian territory because they were once both part of the same Empire.

There was no direct contact between Tibet and Ming Dynasty China. Tibet continued to look towards the Mongols (who had been converted to Tibetan Buddhism) for military patronage. The term "Dalai" is a Mongolian term meaning "ocean", meaning that the 3rd Dalai Lama (the first to carry the title) was an "ocean of wisdom" but also as a play on his name - Sonam Gyatso. "Gyatso" is Tibetan for "ocean". Each subsequent Dalai Lama bears the name "Gyatso", the current Dalai Lama being Tenzin Gyatso.

In 1644, the Manchu invaded China, the last of the Ming Emperor's committed suicide, and the Manchu (Qing Dynasty) was founded. This lasted until the revolution and the end of Chinese Imperial rule in 1911. The Great 5th Dalai Lama, sought to re-establish the Cho-Yon relationship with the Manchu Emperors, along the same lines as the Sakya-Mongol accord some 400 years earlier.

The Manchu sent armies to rescue Tibet from foreign invasions under Qianlong and Kangsi - from the Dzungar Mongols, and the Nepalese. These are commemmorated in stone tablets that still stand in front of the Potala in Lhasa.

Manchu power in Tibet reached its zenith with Qianlongs edicts of 1792 that included the stationing of an Imperial Resident (Amban) in Lhasa to oversee the operations of the Tibetan Government, and the introduction of a "Golden Urn" for the drawing of lots to determine the true incarnation of high-ranking Tibetan clerics where no strong candidate stood out. In practice, this method was never employed for the Panchen Lama (until the farcical events of 1995) and on only one occasion for a Dalai Lama - on that occasion, His Holiness' reincarnation had already been identified but under Chinese pressure, the urn (containing only the one name) was used to confirm it.

After years of negotiating treaties on Tibet with the Chinese, which the Tibetans ignored because they had not been a party to them, Britain realised that by this time any semblance of Chinese power in Tibet had been reduced to a fiction and if they wanted Tibet to agree to a treaty, it would have to be concluded with Tibet directly. They invaded in 1903 and concluded the Lhasa "Convention" in August 1904. They later stabbed Tibet in the back by concluding a seperate treaty with China in 1906, supposedly "ratifying" the 1904 convention. During the invasion, the Chinese Amban continuously tried to pander to British demands, being largely responsible for feeding the invasion force once it had reached Lhasa, but was prevented from doing so because the Tibetans refused to supply him with transport - showing how much power he actually wielded in Tibet.

The Chinese invaded Tibet in 1910, the Dalai Lama fleeing into exile in India, thereby imposing direct central Chinese control (albeit by a Manchu, not a Chinese, government) for the first time in Tibetan history.

The Manchu Dynasty (another ruling house of hated foreigners to be overthrown by the Chinese when the time was ripe), finally self-destructed in 1911. The Imperial soldiers were no longer being paid, were selling their weapons for food, and were finally overthrown by the Tibetans and forced to leave Tibet. They were forced to march out through India, the Tibetans thereby showing to the world that they were an independant Nation. His Holiness returned to Lhasa and in September 1912, officially declared Tibet a fully independant, sovereign State with no ties to China.

From then, until his death in 1933, the Chinese government had no contact with the government of the sovereign State of Tibet. His Holiness set about reforming his country, with strong opposition from the conservative clergy. He designed the most beautiful flag in the world, highly symbolic of Tibet's long history as a Nation, Tibet had a standing army, a postal service issuing its own postage stamps, produced its own coins and banknotes (again amongst the most beautiful in the world), concluded treaties as a sovereign State with Nepal and Mongolia, maintained borders and customs, collected taxes and dispensed government services. When they saw the need to broaden their contacts with the outside world, Tibetan Government officials travelled on Tibetan passports. There are more than 180 member Nations in the United Nations today and many of them now cannot satisfy all the requirements of a fully independant, sovereign Nation that Tibet did between 1912-1950. Indeed, Australia still has as its Head-of-State, a Foreign Monarch - in this instance alone, Tibet was far more entitled to be recognised as an independant Nation than was Australia. However, Tibet's greatest desire was to be left alone, so they didn't join the UPU, or the UN and when the time came, the countries who most intimately knew of Tibet's actual political status, Great Britain and India, sold Tibet down the river by saying that Tibet's international status was "ambiguous".

The Chinese never gave up their claim to Tibet and following their success in the Civil war in 1949, vowed to "liberate" it and "return" Tibet to the motherland from which it was seperated by language, culture, ethnicity, and over 2000 years of seperate history. They invaded on 7 October, 1950 and on the 23rd May, 1951 forced a Tibetan delegation to sign an agreement in Beijing (using forged Tibetan seals created for the occasion), that signed away Tibetan independance.

They also vowed to "liberate" Taiwan, another part of "Chinese" territory which had rarely, if ever, been administered directly by a Central Chinese Government, until the KMT moved there in 1949 (the Dutch have an older claim on the "isle formosa" than the Chinese), but thereby lies another tale.......