The Dalai-Lamas and Regents of Tibet : a Chronological Study

Abstract

Modern Tibetan history, and chiefly that of the 19th century, suffers from a general vagueness and uncertainty about dates. The usual accountsx) rely on second-hand information and on the Chinese texts, whose data after 1750 are meagre and insufficient the nearer one comes to our times: the one vital exception is the Gurkha war of 1791-2. The fact is that the 19th century can be defined as the colonial period of Tibetan history: a time of peace but not of prosperity, drab and uninteresting by all standards. Accordingly, the official lives of the Dalai-Lamas, who always died quite young, give only details of their education, studies, audiences etc. For the Chinese, Tibet had become an uninteresting protectorate, whose affairs were handled directly by the two Manchu residents in Lhasa (amban) with scanty reference to the Peking government, and therefore very little material on Tibet can be found in the enormous collection of the Veritable Docu ments (Shih-lu) of the late Ch'ing dynasty. It is.my purpose to place on a sounder footing the chronology of the Dalai-Lamas and above all of the regents, who in fact were almost invariably the actual rulers of Tibet in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is not my intention to write a history of Tibet during