Sacred Arts of Tibet (.pdf) - Asian Art Museum | Education

Sacred Arts of Tibet
The Manchu Empire and Tibet
Manchu interaction with Tibet began in 1721, when the Manchu emperor of China’s Qing dynasty
(1644-1911) sent a delegation to Lhasa. The Manchu Emperors were devout Buddhists who followed the
Tibetan style of Buddhism exclusively. They looked to the Dalai Lama as their spiritual head, and invited
large numbers of Lamas to establish monasteries and centers of Tibetan religion throughout China. Under
the Manchus, Tibetan Buddhism became the state religion of China. (See Slides 9, 15, and 18)
With the collapse of the Manchu Qing dynasty in China in 1911, Tibet lost its spiritual control over
China. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Tibet was subjected to increasing
pressure from a new mechanized, materialistic China hungry for land and for the vast mineral treasures
and forests of the Tibetan plateau. For the first time in history, the Chinese army had the means to
successfully invade Tibet. With modern airplanes and arms, the walls of mountains surrounding Tibet
could no longer hold back the invasion. Resentment against the invasion boiled over in the Lhasa uprising
of 1959, which, meeting a quick and bloody end, resulted in the flight of the present Dalai Lama to India
and the replacement of the Tibetan government with direct Chinese rule. During the Cultural Revolution
of the 1960s, there was wholesale destruction of Tibetan religion and culture at the same time that the
People’s Republic put forth an aggressive policy of assimilation. Now Tibet’s rich religious culture exists
primarily in exile, preserved in the Tibetan refugee communities all over the world. The Chinese army’s
“peaceful liberation” of Tibet cost an estimated one-fifth of the population—1,200,00 Tibetans were killed
by the Chinese between 1959 and 1969.
Tibet Today
Tibet is a very different country today than it was prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Mao’s
famous proclamation that “Religion is poison” has translated into nearly wholesale destruction of Buddhist
monasteries and those who lived in them. Traditionally a religiously oriented country, culturally and politically,
this Chinese attitude continues to devastate the Tibetans and their traditions. Because of aggressive
Chinese settlement policies, Chinese now outnumber Tibetans in much of Tibet, and there is one Chinese
soldier stationed in Tibet for every two Tibetans. Some things continue on despite the invasion and occupation.
Tibetan Buddhists still travel great distances to go on religious pilgrimage, and nomads continue
to live much as their ancestors did. Parents still send their children to monasteries to be educated, only
now they often chose to brave the treacherous journey across the Himalayas to place their children in one
of the vibrant Tibetan monastic centers in India. Between the losses to Chinese bullets (emigration from
Tibet is prohibited as a “crime against the Chinese people”) and the hazards of trekking over the highest
mountains in the world, this takes the lives of about half of the Tibetans who try to escape.
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