Book Review: Tibet: A History – Sam Van Schaik

Ford, G. (2012). Tibet: A History by Sam Van Schaik, Asian Review of Books, 8 February.

Sam Van Schaik, a lecturer at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the British Library’s expert on early Tibet has written a sweeping history encompassing from before the glory days of the Tibetan Empire in the seventh century to the present day. Schaik tells a good story—more “The Borgia’s” than “Lost Horizon”—that is a catalogue of perfidy, persecution and poison as the warring tribes of Tibet fought across the centuries for position and privilege. Religion initially was picked up and put down to suit the tastes and sensitivities of the kaleidoscope of allies—and enemies—who came into play. As early as the eighth century, Tibet’s blatant flouting of a treaty with the Tang Emperor saw the Chinese form an alliance that had the Tibetans fighting the Chinese in the East, the Uighur Turks in the North and Harun al-Rashid’s Arabs in the West.

It was then that for external political reasons Buddhism became the religion of the Court, over time assimilating and swallowing Tibet’s native religion save for the outlying Bonpo school, more an amalgam of nativist spirit worship and Buddhism. Bonpo long remained outside the pale. Only finally admitted into the Buddhist canon more for reasons of politics than theology by the  Dalai Lama in the 1950’s when he was desperately trying to build a united front against China.

Tibet became a theocracy in name, and for much of the time in practice. The system’s problem was partly its nature—with re-incarnation giving twenty year hiatuses between successive Dalai Lamas—as well as the savagery and calculation of politics. Some Regents preferred poisoning their charges rather than surrendering power or—in one case—keeping the fifth Dalai Lama’s death secret for fifteen years. Equally some ‘found’ re-incarnations were jarringly politically convenient and were unimpeded by the candidates conspicuous inability to pass the tests designed to prove their authenticity.

In the nineteenth century, Tibet got drawn into the Great Game, initially between Russia and the British Empire.  Like the British Report on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction this was another ‘dodgy dossier’ that had the Tsar arming Lhasa, resulting in the British-Tibetan War of 1904. Francis Younghusband’s expedition advanced initially to Gyantse, where elderly matchlock rifles and printed charms blessed by the Dalai Lama proved no defence against maxim guns firing 600 rounds a minute. After the massacre, it was on to Lhasa. The British rather limply withdrew after the Tibetans promised to sign no treaties of alliance with Moscow, but not soon enough to stop the creation of a body of elderly men and women in Gyantse with claims on British Nationality with a British grandfather in the family tree.

This war woke the Chinese up to the atrophying of their control over Lhasa. Their attempts to re-assert their influence saw then Dalai Lama flee to India where he imbibed nationalism and an enthusiasm for modernization at the feet of the British Empire. Yet both the Tibetan Russophiles and the ‘modernizers’ came to sticky ends. The monk Dorjiev—who had acted as the Dalai Lama’s envoy to St. Petersburg—was arrested by the KGB and died in one of Stalin’s prisons in 1938. Lungshar, a Tibetan official who had travelled to London in 1913 to meet King George and a proponent of modernization, was promptly arrested when his protector the Dalai Lama died in 1934 and received the traditional Tibetan punishment of having his eyes pulled out from their sockets.

Tibet effectively fell off China’s map from the collapse of Imperial China in 1911 into a tangle of civil wars until Mao’s final victory in 1949. The re-integration of Tibet into China’s Empire became a top priority alongside Taiwan and the Korean War. The arrival of the Peoples Liberation Army was initially welcomed by many, but the twists and turns of Mao’s politics, aided and abetted by the malign influence of the CIA, saw the mood sour and the current Dalai Lama—who at one time had wanted to join the Communist Party—seek exile in India in 1959. Washington funded and airlifted arms for the insurgency until the U.S. finally woke up to the Sino-Soviet split. Once Nixon had travelled to Beijing to meet Mao in 1972, CIA funds dried up and the Tibetans turned to Moscow for help.

The armed struggle is no more, not that many in the Tibetan Youth Congress might welcome its return if there is no progress towards autonomy with the present Dalai Lama. But the political wind is blowing the wrong way. As Schaik points out, as recently as 2008 Foreign Secretary David Miliband bowed to China’s growing influence and, abrogating the Simla Accord of 1914, announced that Britain would no longer consider China’s relationship to be defined by suzerainty—a state having some control over another state that is internally autonomous—recognizing instead China’s sovereignty. Tibet: A History tells us in a well-written and authoritative way where Tibet has come from, but not where it goes from here.