The Snow Lion and the Dragon. Melvyn C. Goldstein

in accordance with a hauntingly beautiful poem he had written before his death that said,

      Lend me your wings, white crane;

      I go no farther than Litang, and thence return again.⁷

      As displeasure with the situation in Lhasa rose, the monks of the three great Geluk monasteries around Lhasa turned to the Geluk's Mongol followers, the Dzungars, for aid in overthrowing Lhabsang Khan and his false Dalai Lama and installing the boy from Litang as the seventh Dalai Lama.

      In 1717 seven thousand Dzungar cavalrymen entered Tibet and, with the aid of a number of Tibetan monks and laymen, quickly defeated Lhabsang Khan, who was killed in the fighting. The Dzungars appointed a new Tibetan regent, deposed the “false” sixth Dalai Lama installed by Lhabsang, arrested and executed a number of aristocrats and lamas who had been close supporters of Lhabsang Khan, and became the new rulers of Tibet. However, the Mongols soon alienated Tibetans by engaging in looting and by executing some Red Hat lamas. And critically, they failed to bring the new seventh Dalai Lama from Amdo to Tibet, as they had promised. The Qing emperor and his allies, understanding the political importance of the Dalai Lama, beat the Dzungars to the punch and placed the Litang boy under their control. Opposition to the Dzungar presence grew quickly in Lhasa.

      In the meantime, two important Tibetan aristocrats—Pholhanas and Khangchennas—began to organize forces in west and southwest Tibet to oppose the Dzungars, and the Qing emperor, Kangxi, sent an army into Tibet in response to a plea for help dispatched by Lhabsang Khan before his defeat. When this Qing army was annihilated by the Dzungars, most court officials in Beijing were opposed to further military operations in Tibet, but the emperor saw Tibet as an important buffer for western China (Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan) and was unwilling to allow it to remain in the control of his enemy, the Dzungars.⁸ Consequently, he ordered a second, larger army into Tibet, sending the young seventh Dalai Lama with them. As the Qing troops entered Tibet from Amdo and Kham, the Tibetan forces of Pholhanas and Khangchennas also moved on Lhasa from the southwest. This time the Dzungars were defeated, and in October 1720 the Qing army entered Lhasa with the new seventh Dalai Lama. Qing troops now controlled Lhasa and Tibet.

      The Qing emperor was not interested in administratively absorbing Tibet into China. His goal was to control the actions of Tibet's fractious leaders, and particularly to prevent its lamas from using their religious sway over the Mongols to harm Qing interests. In the past the Qing had tried to win the friendship and allegiance of high Tibetan lamas like the Dalai Lama through titles and gifts, but that approach had proved insufficient. Now the Qing decided to create a kind of loose protectorate over Tibet to enforce its dynastic interests. The powerful Qing dynasty would protect Tibet from external and internal conflict, leaving Tibetan leaders it approved of to rule Tibet in a manner that was not inimical to Qing interests. The structuring of this passive hegemony took the Qing the rest of the eighteenth century and forced them to send armies into Tibet on three more occasions.

      The Qing made a number of important changes in the administration of Tibet. They installed the fifteen-year-old Litang boy in the Potala Palace as the seventh Dalai Lama and arrested and executed the main pro-Dzungar officials, including the Tibetan regent the Dzungars had appointed. The Qing solidified their new dominance in Tibet by building a military garrison in Lhasa and staffing it with several thousand troops. They also eliminated the office of regent (initiated by the Qoshot Mongols in 1642), replacing it in 1721 with collective rule by four ministers (kalön), one of whom, Khangchennas, was appointed chairman. All four ministers were important lay Tibetan officials who had supported Lhabsang Khan and opposed the Dzungar's invasion.

      Father I. Desideri, a Jesuit priest living in Lhasa at this time, prophetically wrote of this event: "After nigh twenty years of tumult and disaster this…Tibet…was thus subjugated by the emperor of China in October, 1720, and here his descendants will probably continue to reign for many centuries."⁹ The religious conflict between the Geluk and Karma Kargyu sects had therefore brought Tibet under the control first of the Qoshot Mongols, then of the Dzungar Mongols, and finally of the Qing dynasty. The latter would remain the overlords of Tibet until they fell from power in China in 1911.

      The 1720 Qing administrative reforms did not go well. The strategy of replacing a single all-powerful regent with a number of ministers created bitter dissension rather than a stable balance of power. In 1727 civil war erupted when three ministers assassinated the chief minister Khangchennas and tried to kill Pholhanas, a minister who supported him. Pholhanas, however, escaped the assassination plot and raised an army in southwest and west Tibet, his home area. He moved on Lhasa and defeated the other ministers, taking control of the city in July 1728.

      No Qing troops were present to restore order in Lhasa because the emperor had withdrawn his garrison in 1722 after Tibet's ministers complained that it was difficult to feed several thousand troops from what was basically a feudal subsistence economy. Consequently, when he learned of the coup attempt in Tibet, the Qing emperor had to dispatch another imperial army to Lhasa (the third in a decade). This force arrived two months after Pholhanas had taken the city. With the situation calm and the ministers responsible for the coup under Pholhanas's control, the Qing commander and Pholhanas jointly formed a judicial board that ordered the execution of the three ministers and their families as well as a number of other officials and lamas involved. New ministers were appointed, but Pholhanas, now clearly the dominant figure, was confirmed as the chief administrator of Tibet. The twenty-two-year-old seventh Dalai Lama, however, experienced a different fate. He was sent into exile in Kham, together with his father, who had apparently intrigued with the fallen ministers as well as with the Dzungars.

      Administratively, the Qing imposed reforms they hoped would stabilize the situation in Tibet. To ensure law and order, the Qing military garrison was reestablished in Lhasa with two thousand troops. A supporting garrison of one thousand troops was set up in Chamdo, in eastern Tibet, to facilitate the deployment of reinforcements. Additionally, the emperor now decided to station two Manchu imperial residents (known as amban) in Lhasa with orders to keep a close watch on the leaders of Tibet and oversee the garrison in Lhasa.¹⁰ The practice of having Qing ambans in Lhasa continued until 1912.

      The Qing also weakened Tibet by substantially reducing its territories in the border area between Tibet and China. In 1728 three large ethnic Tibetan areas in Kham were placed under the jurisdiction of Sichuan and three others under the jurisdiction of Yunnan province.¹¹ Amdo or Kokonor had already been placed under the jurisdiction of Xining in 1724 after a revolt by the Mongol khans ruling there. The emperor tried to further fragment Tibet in 1728 by offering the Yellow Hat sect's second greatest incarnation, the Panchen Lama, administrative control over all of southwest (Tsang) and western Tibet. The Panchen Lama refused this offer, but ultimately accepted control over three large districts in Tsang. The Lhasa government, therefore, now ruled a substantially scaled-down political entity.

      The reforms of 1728 were effective, and for the next nineteen years Tibet was internally peaceful. Pholhanas was a strong and capable administrator who was able to operate a well-run and stable government while skillfully gaining the confidence of the ambans and the Qing emperor. He quickly persuaded Beijing to reduce the garrison in Lhasa to five hundred troops, and in 1735 brought the seventh Dalai Lama back from exile, although excluding him from any involvement in the administration of Tibet. The Dalai Lama was now nothing more than a spiritual figurehead. In 1739 Pholhanas was given the title of prince by the Qing emperor, becoming, in essence, the king of Tibet. The two ambans remained in Lhasa but had little to do with everyday administration; Pholhanas determined the course of Tibetan events. As one Chinese historian notes, Pholhanas "made all the decisions in Tibet, the amban being consulted merely regarding their implementation."¹²

      When Pholhanas died in 1747, his son Gyurme Namgye inherited his title of prince. One hundred years after unification under the fifth Dalai Lama, Tibet was now ruled not by Dalai Lamas but by a lay aristocratic family as a Qing dependency. Gyurme Namgye's attitude toward the Qing was very different from his father's. Pholhanas had skillfully managed Sino-Tibetan relations by carefully exuding an attitude of friendship and loyalty to the Qing, securing in return the freedom to rule Tibet in accordance with its native customs and values. His son, on the other hand, sought to rid Tibet of all