The seventeen years between the death of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in December 1933 and the formal investiture of the Fourteenth at fifteen in November 1950 are the longest interregnum in the modern history of the Ganden Phodrang. The country was governed by two regents — Reting Rinpoche from 1934 to 1941, Taktra Rinpoche from 1941 to 1950 — drawn from the senior incarnate lineages of the great Gelug monasteries. The period combined an unusual political stability (the absence of any major external pressure on Tibet between the Japanese conflict beginning in 1937 and the Chinese Communist victory in 1949) with an underlying institutional dysfunction (the systemic conservatism of regency rule, which produced a substantial deceleration of the modernisation programmes of the Thirteenth's reign).
The death of the Thirteenth
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama died at the Norbulingka, the summer palace, on the 17th of December 1933, aged fifty-seven. The official medical cause was given as cerebral haemorrhage; the symptomatic description in the surviving Lhasa records is suggestive of a stroke. The persistent rumour that the death had been poisoning was substantially encouraged by the political conduct of the Chamberlain Kunpela, who in the weeks before the Lama's final illness had been substantially expanding his personal influence over the household, and who in the immediate aftermath was tried by the regency for mismanagement of the medical care during the Lama's last illness and for the unauthorised personal-bodyguard force he had established. Kunpela was convicted, stripped of office, exiled from Lhasa, and ultimately permitted to take monastic ordination at Drepung after a period of penance. The political consequence was the elimination of the principal candidate for an interim political leadership outside the monastic regency system.
The Reting regency
The regency was elected by the National Assembly in January 1934. The candidates were drawn from the senior incarnate lineages of the great monasteries — a custom that had been observed in earlier regency selections. The selection fell on Reting Rinpoche, Thubten Jampel Yeshe Gyaltsen, the abbot of the Reting Monastery (a Kadampa institution founded in 1057 in the upper Reting valley north of Lhasa). Reting was twenty-four at his election — strikingly young, but the youthfulness was a political advantage in a context in which the Kashag wished a regent who would not seek to exercise an independent personality at the expense of the bureaucracy.
The Reting regency from 1934 to 1941 was characterised, in foreign-policy terms, by the same broad accommodation of British, Chinese and Nepalese interests that the Thirteenth had pursued. The substantive domestic reforms continued at substantially diminished tempo: the army was further reduced to approximately 3,000 men, the English-school project remained moribund, and the Chinese Mongolian-and-Tibetan Affairs Commission was permitted to establish its informal Lhasa mission in 1934 under cover of the Huang Mu-sung condolence delegation. The Reting regency's principal historical contribution was the conduct of the search for the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
The search for the Fourteenth
The reincarnation search of 1935-39 followed the customary procedures: the consultation of the state oracles, the divination at the sacred lake of Lhamoi Latso, the dispatch of search parties to the regions in which the divinatory signs had indicated the new incarnation might be found. The principal divinatory result — three letters seen by the Reting Rinpoche personally in the surface of the Lhamoi Latso, interpreted as "Ah" (Amdo), "Ka" (the village of Kumbum) and "Ma" (the monastery near Kumbum) — directed the search east into Amdo, the easternmost Tibetan-speaking region, then under the administration of the Chinese-Muslim warlord Ma Bufang of Qinghai.
The search party led by Kewtsang Rinpoche identified, in the summer of 1937, a two-year-old boy named Lhamo Dhondrub at the village of Taktser, near the Kumbum monastery — the third son of a family of subsistence farmers. The standard tests of recognition (the identification of the previous incarnation's personal possessions from a mixed selection) were administered and the boy passed them; the formal certification followed in 1939, after extended negotiation with Ma Bufang over the substantial ransom that the Qinghai government demanded for the boy's release. The new incarnation was formally installed as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, at the Potala on the 22nd of February 1940 — aged four years and seven months.
The Reting affair
The 1940s political crisis of the Tibetan government — and one of the more peculiar incidents of twentieth-century Tibetan history — was the Reting affair of 1947. Reting Rinpoche had retired from the regency in 1941, on what was understood at the time as a sabbatical to attend to certain spiritual obligations at his monastery, with a private undertaking that he would resume the regency in due course. The successor regent, Taktra Rinpoche, declined to honour the resumption arrangement when Reting requested it in 1944. The breakdown of the relationship between the two regents — a former and a sitting one — produced, in 1947, an attempted coup by Reting's supporters in the Sera monastery (Reting was an alumnus) against the Taktra regency.
The Sera-Che rebellion of April-May 1947 produced approximately 200 deaths in fighting between the Sera monastic militia and the regular army. Reting was arrested at his Reting monastery in late April, transported to Lhasa, and detained at the Potala. He died in detention on the 7th of May 1947 — formally of natural causes, persistently rumoured to have been the consequence of beating or strangulation. The Reting affair has been the subject of extensive subsequent commentary, including by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in his autobiographies, who has expressed the view that Reting's actions were politically inappropriate but that his death was a political and moral failure of the Taktra regency.
The Taktra regency
Taktra Rinpoche's regency from 1941 to 1950 was the period in which the Tibetan government's external position substantially deteriorated. The wartime period was managed with substantive success — the Tibetan government's neutrality between the Japanese, Chinese and British was maintained, the Tolstoy-Dolan American mission of 1942 (the only visit by an accredited American representative to Lhasa) produced no substantive change of the diplomatic position, and the country remained materially uninvolved in the Second World War. The postwar period, however, was substantially mishandled.
The 1945 Lhasa victory celebrations — in which the Tibetan government formally congratulated the Allied powers on the defeat of Japan — produced no substantive recognition of Tibet's wartime conduct by any of the principal Allies. The 1947 Asian Relations Conference at New Delhi seated a Tibetan delegation as a separate national delegation, behind a Tibetan flag — a substantial diplomatic gain that the Chinese delegation protested. The 1948 trade mission to the United States, the United Kingdom, France and India, led by Tsepon Shakabpa, attempted to secure international recognition and substantial commercial relationships; it was received politely at each stop and substantively obtained nothing. The Indian independence of August 1947 transferred the British political relationships with Tibet to the new Indian government, which inherited the British informal accommodation without the British strategic interest that had sustained it.
The principal failure of the Taktra regency was the failure to take the warning of the Communist victory in China seriously. The People's Liberation Army's reunification of the Chinese mainland in 1948-49 was understood in Lhasa as a Chinese internal affair; the application of the Thirteenth's 1932 prediction to the new circumstance was not made until 1949. By the time the Tibetan government attempted, in late 1949 and early 1950, to seek international support and to consolidate its eastern frontier, the moment had passed: the Indian government declined to provide military or substantial diplomatic support; the United States declined to recognise Tibet; the United Kingdom declined to act except in concert with the Indians; the Republic of China at Taipei continued to assert sovereignty; the People's Republic of China was preparing the invasion that would arrive in October 1950. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, sixteen years old, was formally invested with full temporal and religious power in November 1950, six weeks after the People's Liberation Army's victory at Chamdo. The invasion is the subject of chapter VII.
End of Chapter V