Ganden Phodrang (Dalai Lama's Government)

A groom who became a demon's son

formationDrafted from Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924)

Tibet's own government had passed through two prior eras of priest-kings before the Dalai Lamas ever took secular power. The Sakya hierarchs ruled with Mongol backing from about 1270 to 1345, until King Chang-chub Gyal-tsen broke Sakya power and founded what Bell calls the Second Monarchy - a dynasty that discarded many of the Chinese and Mongol innovations the Sakya lamas had introduced, even as Mongol and Chinese influence kept pressing on Tibet from outside. The Sitya dynasty that followed ruled for three centuries in relative peace and prosperity, until 1635, when it was overthrown by the king of Tsang - a ruler popular tradition, Bell records, credited to trickery and a demon mother, since he had reportedly risen from a stable groom to supreme power through sheer cunning.

Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924) · Sven Hedin · Public domain

Subdued a few years later

The Tsang king's own triumph proved short-lived. Gushi Khan, chief of the Oelöt Mongols, subdued him only a few years after his victory and installed the fifth Dalai Lama, Lobsang Gyatso, on the Tibetan throne in his place - a conquest, not an election, that gave the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism the secular authority it had never held outright before. The fort the Tsang king had built at Shigatse survived him: local tradition holds that the fifth Dalai Lama's own Chief Minister later copied its design for the rebuilt Potala Palace in Lhasa, so that the very architecture of the new Gelug government carried a trace of the rival dynasty Gushi Khan's own conquest had just destroyed.

Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The Great Fifth

peakDrafted from Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924)

Lobsang Gyatso is the only Dalai Lama besides the seventh whom Tibetans remember by an honorific rather than simply a number - "The Great Fifth," a title that has outlasted every criticism contemporary foreign visitors leveled at him. The Jesuit Johann Grueber, who reached Lhasa in 1661 with the Belgian Albert d'Orville - the first Europeans to enter the city - described the ruling Dalai Lama in openly hostile terms, but Bell's own judgment is blunt about how little that mattered to the verdict of history: "nothing succeeds like success." The Fifth Dalai Lama did not personally administer the government he now headed for long; following established custom, he withdrew to religious matters and left secular affairs to his Chief Minister, Sang-gye Gyatso, a man Bell calls one of exceptional talent.

Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924) · Johann Grueber · Public domain

A capital rebuilt and centralized

Under that arrangement the government of Tibet was centralized in Lhasa and made genuinely more orderly - old regional forts, no longer needed as centers of independent power, were gradually abandoned and left to fall into ruin. The Great Prayer Festival, still the largest and most striking event of the Lhasa calendar, was established on its lasting basis during this reign, trebling or quadrupling the capital's own population for three weeks each February and March. Sang-gye Gyatso completed the Potala Palace in its present form a few years after his own master's death, giving the new Gelug government a physical monument to match its consolidated authority. Bell's own assessment of the era is double-edged: the Fifth Dalai Lama and his minister were men of real exceptional ability, but the growing influence of Buddhism itself had softened Tibetan martial vigor, so that from this point onward Tibet's own weight in regional affairs would be religious rather than military - a shift the early Manchu emperors of China, already courting the Dalai Lama's support to help manage their own Mongol subjects, were quick to exploit.

Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924) · Laurence Waddell · No restrictions

The Fifth Dalai Lama died in 1680. His own Chief Minister concealed the death for a time, ruling in his name while the Chinese court, Bell notes, quietly went along with the concealment because it let them keep citing his authority in their own dealings with the Mongols - a convenient fiction on both sides that could not, in the end, be maintained indefinitely.

A choice the emperor abandoned

contractionDrafted from Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924)

In due course a successor, Tsang-yang Gyatso, was installed in the Pontifical Chair - a young man of real intelligence who devoted himself to composing verse and enjoying the pleasures of the capital rather than to religious duty, in a way that left many Tibetans and Mongols doubting whether he could genuinely be a true incarnation at all. That doubt gave China its opening. In 1700 Chinese forces occupied Tachienlu, a strategic post on the road from Lhasa to Sichuan, and annexed part of eastern Tibet outright; in 1706 the Chinese and their Mongol allies removed the sixth Dalai Lama and put him to death, declaring him no true incarnation and installing their own twenty-five-year-old nominee in the Potala instead. Tibetans refused to accept the substitute. Reports that Tsang-yang Gyatso had already reincarnated at Litang spread through Lhasa, and with the help of a fresh body of Oelöt Mongols who pushed through to the capital, the Tibetans held their ground against the Chinese-appointed rival even as the crisis let China tighten its own grip on the country regardless of who actually sat in the Potala.

An emperor who changed his mind

The Kangxi Emperor found nearly every Mongol tribe backing the Tibetans' own choice and regarded his own nominee as widely seen as an impostor - a dangerous split that raised the specter, in Bell's own reading, of a combined Mongol-Tibetan force uniting against China outright. Kangxi's first army, sent in 1718, was defeated by the Oelöts and Tibetans together. Rather than press a losing hand, he abandoned his own candidate, adopted the boy the Tibetans themselves had chosen, and sent a second, larger army to Lhasa in 1720 - announcing, this time, that it came to enthrone the Tibetans' own pick rather than to impose a rival. Tibetan resistance evaporated once the goal aligned with their own choice, and the Chinese army entered Lhasa unopposed, leaving a garrison of two thousand men behind and keeping the road to Sichuan open with permanent detachments - a Chinese military presence in the capital that had not existed before the crisis over Tsang-yang Gyatso's own death began.

Massacre and restoration

Chinese oversight deepened further three decades later. In 1750 the Chinese Residents at Lhasa, known as Ambans, murdered the sitting Tibetan Regent; the people of Lhasa rose and massacred the Chinese in response. The Qianlong Emperor dispatched an army that restored Chinese ascendancy and left the Amban system stronger than before - a cycle in which every Tibetan attempt to assert independent authority against Chinese oversight ended, in Bell's own telling, with that oversight more deeply entrenched than it had been before the crisis began. The government Gushi Khan's conquest had installed in 1642 endured through all of it, but by the middle of the eighteenth century it endured as something the Qing court now expected to supervise rather than merely to court.

Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924) · Ovshe Norzunov · Public domain

A proclamation thrown in the dirt

contractionDrafted from Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924)

British anxiety over Russian influence in Tibet, more than any Tibetan provocation, produced the next real crisis for the Ganden Phodrang's own government. A mission under Colonel Younghusband, sent in 1903 to negotiate trade and frontier questions, found Tibetan officials unwilling to talk and grew, over the following months, into a full military expedition - fighting its way from the Chumbi Valley to Gyantse and on to Lhasa itself against Tibetan soldiers armed with antiquated matchlocks and swords against modern rifles. The Dalai Lama and his entourage fled north to Urga in Mongolia rather than receive the British in his own capital, leaving his ministers to sign the Lhasa Convention of 7 September 1904 in his absence.

Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924) · John Claude White · Public domain

A deposition nobody in Lhasa accepted

Beijing tried to use the crisis to reassert its own authority directly, issuing a proclamation deposing the Thirteenth Dalai Lama outright. The Tibetans' answer was immediate and unambiguous: they smeared the proclamation with dirt and, throughout the years of His Holiness's exile - first in Mongolia, then in China itself, where he was received by the Qing court - continued referring every important question of state to him in absentia, exactly as though the deposition had never been proclaimed at all. He did not see his own capital again until the very end of 1909, more than five years after he had fled it.

A homecoming that lasted weeks

The Dalai Lama's return to Lhasa proved brief. Chinese troops under the aggressive general Chao Erh-feng had already been subjugating eastern Tibet by force in his absence, and in February 1910 some two thousand Chinese soldiers advanced on Lhasa itself; an advance party entered the city, fired on the population, and moved to seize the Tibetan ministers outright. Fearing execution or permanent imprisonment for the man they had just welcomed home, the Dalai Lama and his government fled the capital again in the middle of the night

• this time south toward India rather than north toward Mongolia, with the Ganden Phodrang's own seals of office carried out alongside them.

Nine days to the frontier

endDrafted from Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924)

The flight from Lhasa in February 1910 was, by any measure, a remarkable feat for a court accustomed to leisurely travel: the Dalai Lama, his ministers and roughly two hundred soldiers covered two hundred and seventy miles in nine days, crossing three high passes and the Tsangpo river with Chinese troops in close pursuit, before riding into safety across the Sikkim frontier and on to Darjeeling. The soldiers left behind at the river crossing to hold off the pursuit did so at real cost, killing a number of the pursuing Chinese before scattering across the country themselves. For a second time in six years, Chinese assertion of authority over Tibet had driven its own government into exile rather than secured it.

Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (1924) · J. Burlington Smith · Public domain

A revolution nobody in Lhasa had to fight

What finally reversed the occupation was not Tibetan arms but a collapse in China itself. As the Qing dynasty's own authority disintegrated in the revolution of 1911, the Chinese garrison occupying Tibet lost the political backing that had sent it there in the first place; large numbers of its soldiers were captured and deported to Sikkim, where Tibetan captors - by British report - treated their former occupiers with a humanity that startled British observers. By June 1912 the Chinese held no effective power left in central Tibet at all, and the Dalai Lama returned from his second exile to a country his own officials were already reclaiming without him.

A garrison sent home rather than destroyed

The remaining Chinese troops garrisoned in Lhasa itself surrendered a few months after the Dalai Lama's return and were escorted out across the Indian frontier, given the same considerate treatment as the soldiers deported earlier - a telling contrast with the violence the Chinese occupation had itself employed. Ten-gye-ling monastery, which had collaborated with the Chinese administration and long held the privileged right to supply a regent during a Dalai Lama's minority, was subdued, its monks expelled and its estates confiscated by the Ganden Phodrang's own government. What had begun in 1750 as a tightening of Qing oversight after the murder of the Ambans ended, within the same institution's own lifetime, in the complete expulsion of Chinese officials and troops from central Tibet - not a change of government, but the same government the Great Fifth's regent had built two and a half centuries earlier, ruling its own country again without a foreign garrison inside it for the first time in generations.