My apologies for the length of time it took to publish these. I've been busy re-integrating my book collection from China, which has FINALLY returned home, in with the books I've acquired since. The result of having so many new books that I have been away from for a while is that cross-referencing the new with the old has taken some time, but I think the number of citations this article provides will show it's been worth the time (and the headache) to get them here and settled in with their American cousins.
Lies? From China? Gee, What a Surprise!
In previous articles, I commented on the farcical nature of China's claim of ownership of Tibet based on the Tang and Yuan Dynasties (if the latter can even truly be considered a "Chinese" dynasty at all). More ludicrous still is China's narrative regarding the Ming era. The Chinese Government White Paper on Tibet, a document which, in typical Chinese fashion, cites no sources whatsoever while its writers swear it constitutes some kind of "proof," has this to say on the subject of Ming Dynasty control over Tibet.
In 1368 the Ming Dynasty replaced the Yuan Dynasty in China, and inherited the right to rule Tibet.
Having made this hit-and-run attempt to legitimize the Ming Dynasty's claim over Tibet by claiming that they "inherited" it from the Mongolian Empire because in their minds the Mongolian conquests were Chinese (which must be hard to reconcile with their insistence that China has never invaded a country in 5,000 years, but I digress), they go on to try and claim it doesn't matter if it was legitimate or not because it was fait accompli.
The central government of the Ming Dynasty retained most of the titles and ranks of official positions instituted during the Yuan Dynasty. In the central and eastern parts of present-day Tibet, the Dbus-Gtsang Itinerant High Commandery and the Mdo-khams Itinerant High Commandery were set up respectively. Equivalent to provincial-level military organs, they operated under the Shaanxi Itinerant High Commandery and, at the same time, handled civil administration. In Ngari in west Tibet, the E-Li-Si Army-Civilian Marshal Office was instituted. Leading officials of these organs were all appointed by the central government.
-Part One: "Ownership of Tibet")
Cao Dawei and Sun Yanjing's China's History, a Chinese government-printed textbook that cites just as few sources while repeatedly attesting to its own "unquestionability," attempts to portray the Tibetans as helpless, directionless vassals, crying out for the self-anointed "Central Nation" to save them from "backwardness."
Tibet accepted the jurisdiction of the Ming Dynasty after the Yuan Dynasty ended.
-p. 161
This same book goes on to tell a lie that's brazen even by China's usual dubious standards. It claims that it was a Ming emperor who first conferred the title of Dalai Lama, and that it was bestowed upon Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, the "Great Fifth (p. 161)," and retroactively applied to the previous four. This is one of the most easily debunked lies China has ever told. The title of "Dalai Lama," if "title" is really the right word for it (more on that later), was bestowed upon Sonam Gyatso, a Tibetan high lama known today as the Third Dalai Lama, by a Mongolian prince named Altan Khan in 1578, more 39 years before the 5th Dalai Lama was even born (and 20 years before anyone in China even heard the phrase). It was later retroactively applied to the two previous incarnations of the same lama, in accordance with Tibetan Gelug belief (Laird, 142).
Except, even this has an asterisk over it, because in actuality, the words "Dalai Lama" aren't even a title at all. They're the Mongolian translation of Sonam Gyatso's surname (Gyatso in Tibetan and Dalai in Mongolian both mean "ocean") combined with the term "Lama" which is used in Tibetan, Mongolian, Mandarin and several other languages, to mean a high-ranking monk recognized as a reincarnation (Laird, 143). In short, it was nothing but the 3rd Dalai Lama's title and surname, translated into his host's language.
And of course, the above-mentioned White Paper's section entitled "Ownership of Tibet" goes on to make one of the most dazzlingly arrogant statements I have ever read.
The central government of the Ming Dynasty showed him [the 3rd Dalai Lama] special favor by allowing him to pay tribute.
I want to emphasize that this line did not come from Global Times or some nationalistic tabloid, but from their own government. The belief that the world is made of broken and pleading vassal states, begging for the chance to grovel at the feet of the Self-anointed Central Nation, and that being "allowed" the opportunity to do so is some privilege, is right there in black and white, direct from the horse's ass mouth.
But China's inherent and incurable Jingo-narcissism isn't the focus of this article. The myth of Ming control over Tibet is. And yes, that is precisely what China's claims of Ming control over Tibet are: a myth.
You "Inherited" What?
First, the entire basis of China's claim is that the Ming "inherited" control of Tibet from Yuan, as one Chinese Dynasty handing down its territory to the next dynasty to rule the same kingdom. Well, the problem with that is that Yuan wasn't Chinese at all, it was Mongolian, as I've stated before. Yuan was the name given by Kubilai to a new empire made from the nations conquered by Mongolia, which included Jin (an ethnic Han kingdom ruled by a distant cousin of both the Ottoman Turks and the Manchu) and Song (an ethnic Han, Vietnamese, Thai and Zhuang kingdom ruled by Han, which continued the long-standing Han tradition of driving out and enslaving indigenous nations and occupying their land). The latter was really the closest thing to "China" that existed before the Mongol conquest.
And after the Mongols were driven out, the ethnic Han, who had previously only ruled a tiny fraction of what became Yuan, were determined to cover the humiliation of their supposedly "Heavenly" kingdom being conquered by nations they considered "maggots and slaves (Pan, 11)," had to rewrite history to claim that the foreign (Mongol) conquest was not a foreign conquest but a "unification (Mosher, 13)." After all, an admission that China did not even exist for 100 years except as the slave caste of a foreign power who conquered them with ease and incorporated China into their larger empire would not mesh well with China's delusions of having an "unbroken civilization (Peng, Zhao & Luo)" dating back to the mythical "Yellow emperor." And so, as part of their little nationwide game of "let's pretend the past century never happened," they issued so-called "decrees" that they had "inherited" the Mongol Empire from the Genghizid Khans.
Now, let's examine this from a sane, logical, and rational (read "non-Chinese") point of view.
When America drove the British out of what is now the United States in 1776 (you might claim we didn't finish the job until 1812), we didn't inherit the British Empire from King George.
When Mahatma Ghandi drove the British from India, India didn't inherit the British Empire either.
When Jose Rizal's followers drove the Spanish out of the Philippines in 1903, they didn't inherit the Spanish Empire.
When Ukraine gained independence, it didn't inherit the Soviet Union.
When Cuba declared its independence from the Americans, it didn't inherit the United States.
How, then, do the Chinese claim that the Ming "inherited" the territory of Yuan, from the Mongols?
Hence, it is no surprise that these "decrees" from Dadu (present-day Beijing) were ignored everywhere except Dadu.
Oh, and there's another bit. Even if one was willing to accept the patently ludicrous claim that the Ming "inherited" the Mongol Empire in 1368 by becoming the first ethnic Han dynasty to rule both northern and southern China since the fall of the Tang in 907 A.D., there's one minor -yet crucial- detail. At the time the Yuan fell, their territory didn't include Tibet.
You see, the Tibetans succeeded in freeing themselves from Yuan control a full 10 years before their slower and less-organized barbarian neighbors known as the Han (or "Chinese") ever did (Laird, 136).
Think of it this way. If your father owns 100 acres of land, and he loses 30 acres of it by gambling, then he dies and leaves all his land to you, do you inherit the 30 acres he lost? Thus you see, the Chinese claim of having "inherited" control of Tibet from the Mongols is absolutely surreal, and it dies upon the unforgiving altar of cold, ruthless historical fact after even the most cursory examination. The only reason this utterly ludicrous claim has ever been accepted is that up until recently, nobody bothered to give China's history books that cursory examination, choosing instead to simply assume that China's government records could be trusted (Midler, 149 & 201). After all, most of the world's government records tend to value some level of historical accuracy more than they value stroking the ruling classes' egos. Not so with China. In China, "thou shalt not have any Gods before the Mighty China" is the first twelve of their State Religion's ten commandments.
Fait Fake Accompli
Of course, never mind the legitimacy of China's claim that the Ming "inherited" control over Tibet. Perhaps we should examine the question of just what "control" the tiny, fragile, newly-established dynasty with its peasant-emperor actually had over the distant plateau, legitimate or not.
The whitepaper cited above claims that the Ming Dynasty "retained most of the titles and ranks of official positions instituted during the Yuan Dynasty." Well, I already noted that this did not include anything in Tibet, as Tibet freed itself from the Mongol yoke a decade before the peasant revolt that would eventually come to call itself "Ming" was ever anything more than a daydream in the mind of a drunken farmer and monastic school washout named Zhu Yuanzhang (later known as the Hongwu Emperor). The same whitepaper also claims the Ming established a military administration for Tibet. The only problem with this claim is that this administration only existed on paper. It was one of the decrees I spoke of that were largely face-saving measures by the Ming court, none of which were ever heeded outside the walls of the Ming capital. The only part of Tibet that ever bent the knee to the Ming was a tiny group of outlying tribes whose total population was 74,710 (1). They did this out of fear of a local Mongol warlord, and this was not until 1590, more than 200 years after the founding of the Ming Dynasty and in fact rather near its end (Smith, 107).
In reality, the full extent of Ming control over Tibet was a few honorary titles given by the Ming court to Eastern Tibetan crime bosses. The Ming Army, which was never much of a force (they weren't even a match for most of the Tatar or Mongol armies living north of the Great Wall (Szczepanski), never actually had a single soldier anywhere in Tibet (Laird, 137), including the part of Tibet which China now calls "Qinghai." The closest they came to "ruling" this area was to recognize the factional faults within it and perpetually support whoever was the weaker faction against their stronger neighbors, thus propping the local factions against each other and ensuring the region could never unite against them (Sperling, 38; cited in Smith, 101 & 102).
If this was in any way recognized as "ruling" an area, then the US would have a legitimate claim to sovereignty over the entire world, because it's what we have done worldwide, quite successfully, since the end of World War 2, and over the Western Hemisphere since World War 1 (Friedman, p. 3 - 5). For the record, no-one in America is stupid enough to equate US foreign policy of propping up local rivals against each other, with US global sovereignty (though China loves to accuse us of trying to do so). Neither does it make any sense to claim Ming's use of the same "divide and overawe" policy equates to any form of "sovereignty" over Tibet.
Tribute? What Tribute?
Another of the straws China grasps at when claiming the Ming ruled Tibet is to cite "tribute missions" from Tibet to the Ming throne as evidence of China's dominion and Tibet's subjugation. Considering that the imposition of tribute payments is undisguised hegemonic colonialism right on its face and the Chinese rather casually admit that (Yan, 11), I'm curious how the Chinese reconcile that with their claim that "the Chinese people never had the history of expansion and domination (Yan, 32)," but I digress.
The point is, as claims of sovereignty go, this is one of the thinnest yet. For one thing, using records of tribute payments as a claim of sovereignty requires conveniently overlooking the countless centuries China spent paying tribute to their tribal neighbors (Smith, 26). Funny how China doesn't claim those proved Xiongnu or Qiang sovereignty over China, isn't it? For another, every member of the "Eight Nation Alliance" that put down the Boxer Terrorists could cite the Boxer Indemnity as a "tribute payment" and claim sovereignty over China, if tribute payments equated to proof of sovereignty.
And of course, there is the fact that most of these "tributes" were not tributes at all, but were merely a mind-numbing ritual merchants had to endure if they wanted to trade with a nation so staggeringly arrogant as the neverending line of swaggering bullies which are collectively referred to as "Chinese" dynasties.
See, according to Imperial China's official records, China never technically engaged in trade relations (at least not by that name) of any kind, with any nation. Ever. After all, what could the "glorious Central Nation" possibly need from any of the "inferior barbarians" surrounding her?
Instead, China dressed their trade up as "tribute" from "barbarian vassals," and claimed that whatever they gave as payment for the merchant's wares was a "gift" to reward the "vassal" in question for their submission. Yu records this rather unabashedly as China's attempt to gain the benefits of foreign trade without compromising their ages-old delusion of superiority over all other nations (p. 39). Essentially, the "Tribute System" was defined as "if you want to trade with China, you have to come to the Imperial Court and role-play the emperor's 'I am a god and all are groveling slaves before me' fetish." Thomas Laird laid it out perfectly in his 2000 interview with the Dalai Lama.
"So the [Chinese] said we are the rulers of the world," I responded, "and insisted that everyone must kowtow to them and pay what they called tribute. The Thais and Tibetans said fine, let's pay what they call tribute, if we can use that as a means to make money through trade with China." (p. 209)
Except, there's reason to doubt that the nations who "paid tribute" to China even went so far as to dress it up in these terms themselves. Evidence exists that many of "tribute" missions sent to China were actually trade missions, and that Chinese eunuchs, in order to appeal to the emperor's ego, discarded the greeting letters that characteristically accompanied these and forged letters of praise, dripping with shameless flattery and worshipful reverence, to be read to the emperor as part of the "we are the Celestial Empire" song-and-dance. And the Ming Era was exactly the time when this evidence comes from.
Take for instance the incident of Timur the Lame and the aforementioned Hongwu Emperor, which I wrote of in a previous article.
As I've already written of the incident in another article I'll simply gloss over it here, but the synopsis is that a Central Asian conqueror who carried the legacy of the Genghizid Khans AND the Mohamedan Caliphate (he was a Muslim Caliph who was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan and ruled what had been one of the Four Hordes of the Genghizid Empire) sold 1,000 warhorses to China (horses which were of a quality far higher than anything China had bred or was capable of breeding). Apparently, one of the court eunuchs, recognizing the value of the warhorses and China's desperate need for them, but also recognizing that the iron-skulled emperor would not "purchase" anything but would only accept it as "tribute," forged such a letter of submission and presented it to the emperor with the horses (Mosher, 12). In response the first Ming Emperor sent a letter back calling Timur "son" and thanking him for his "tribute," which, understandably, enraged Timur beyond reason (Suleimonov). This classic example of 大汉主义 would have earned the frail little Ming empire an invasion by a foe they had no hope of defeating if Timur, one of history's most infamous butchers, had not been too busy crushing the far more powerful Ottoman Empire at the time to focus on the tiny little floundering kingdom on his Eastern flank. As to the veracity of China's claim that this was a "tribute" mission, Robert Kong Chan says it best.
Timurid Empire (1370–1506) was a powerful state in Central Asia, and under the leadership of Timur (1336–1405) the empire was known for its military power that brought it victories one after another during the process of its territorial expansion to the lands of the Persian, the Indian, the Russian, the Egyptian, and the Turk. In Ming’s historical records, however, documented that the Timurid Empire was a vassal state of Ming and Timur acknowledged Ming’s suzerainty and earnestly paid tributes to the Ming emperor. Considering the military might of the Timurid Empire and Timur’s territorial ambition, this inevitably arouses suspicion.
-P. 11, emphasis mine
And of course, having established that the Han Jingoist emperors, especially the Ming, had a history of falsely labelling trade missions as "Tribute" missions, I must also point out that Tibet was a frequent victim of this twisting of history by the Han. As I mentioned in a previous article, China's historical records record an envoy sent by Songtsen Ghampo to the Tang Emperor Taizong. This envoy carried the suit of armor which Ghampo sent as a consolation prize after razing the Tang capital, decimating its army, carrying away the emperor's favorite daughter as a trophy, and imposing a treaty by which Tang had to pay the Tibetan Empire an annual tribute of silk (which, by China's logic, constitutes proof of Tibetan sovereignty over China, but never mind). And Tang records list this as a "Tribute" mission by the "defeated" Tibetans.
In light of this, it's difficult to attach any value to any Chinese claim that is centered around "of course we ruled them, because see? They paid 'tribute' to us."
So Let's Review
China's claim that the Ming Empire ruled Tibet as part of a continuous line of "Chinese" rule over Tibet beginning with the Yuan Dynasty (notwithstanding the already obvious problems that the Yuan weren't a Chinese dynasty at all) are best summarized as follows. A Party that did not exist until 1921 and was not in power until 1949, citing historical records by a regime they denounce, points to tribute missions that weren't tribute, as evidence of military control they claimed but never exercised (while swearing they never imposed military control over anyone), which they claim to have "inherited" from the deposed Yuan, despite the fact that the Yuan could not have passed the ownership of Tibet to the Ming, since they had already lost it a decade before Ming existed.
To believe something with this many layers of overlapping self-contradictions in it, you'd have to be a completely brain-dead sheep.
You know, like most of the population of China.
(1) For the sake of perspective, there are 82,000 people living between me and the metro station I walk to every day on my way to the gym (or the library if it's Tuesday or Thursday). It's not a lot of people. So it's more than a stretch to claim that the allegiance of 74,710 people, pledged under duress, equates to sovereignty over a nation the combined size of Iran and Iraq, and harder still to claim this oath of allegiance is retroactive to their descendants 200 years prior.
Works Cited
Cao Dawei & Sun Yanjing. Trans. Xiao Ying, Li Li & He Yunzhao. China's History. Beijing, 2010. China Intercontinental Press.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1302-7
Chan, Robert Kong. "Success and Failure of the Ming Century in Pre-modern History and their Contemporary Implications for the Emerging China-centered Pacific Century." School of Professional and Continuing Education. University of Hong Kong. 2017. Web. 25 Sep. 2018.
http://web.isanet.org/Web/Conferences/HKU2017-s/Archive/cd88f6ee-978b-431a-8f8f-25e3ccbbf487.pdf
Friedman, George. The Next Decade. Anchor Books, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-30747-6-395
Laird, Thomas. The Story of Tibet - Conversations With the Dalia Lama. New York, 2006. Grove Press.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4327-3
Midler, Paul. What's Wrong With China? Hoboken, 2018. Wiley.
ISBN 978-1-119-21371-0
Mosher, Stephen F. Bully of Asia. Washington, 2017. Regnery Publishing.
ISBN 978-1-62157-696-9
Pan Yihong. Son of Heaven and Heavenly Qaghan: Sui-Tang China and Its Neighbors. Bellingham: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 1997.
Peng Guanqian, Zhao Zhiyin & Luo Yong. Trans. Ma Chenguang & Yan Shuang. China's National Defense. Beijing, 2010. China Intercontinental Press.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1310-2
Smith, Warren. Tibetan Nation - A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations. 1996, Boulder. Westview Press.
ISBN 978-0-813-332-802
Sperling, Elliot. "Early Ming Policy Toward Tibet (Ph.D. Dissertation)." Indiana University, 1983.
Suleimenov, Arman. Trans. Makhmetzanova, Raushan. "What Happened Between Timur and the Chinese Emperor." National Digital History of Kazakhstan. 11 Mar, 2017. Web. 25 Sep, 2018.
http://e-history.kz/en/publications/view/2921
Szczepanski, Kallie. "Biography of Zhu Di, China's Yongle Emperor." Thoughtco.com. 3 July, 2019. Web. 30 May, 2021. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-yongle-emperor-zhu-di-195231
Tibet: It's Ownership and Human Rights Situation, Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, September 1992, http://www.china.org.cn/e-white/tibet/ . Accessed 15 May, 2021
Yan Jirong. China's Governance. Beijing, 2017. China Renmin University Press.
ISBN 978-7-300-24625-3
Yu Yingshi. Trade and Expansion in Han China. Berkeley, 1967. University of California Press.
ISBN 978-052-0327-955