No account of why Tibet failed to modernise between 1913 and 1950 makes sense without the monasteries, and the monasteries are usually described in religious terms when the decisive facts about them were economic. They were the largest landowners, the largest employers, the largest lenders and the largest political bloc in the country, and they were structurally opposed to almost everything a modernising government would need to do.
The scale is the first thing to grasp. Estimates for the monastic population before 1950 run from ten to fifteen per cent of the total, and something close to a quarter of all adult males; in some districts it was higher. Drepung alone may have held ten thousand monks, Sera five thousand, Ganden three or four. These were not retreats. They were towns, with kitchens, granaries, treasuries, workshops, courts and their own armed proctors.
Where the money came from
Monastic income had three sources. The first was land: estates granted by rulers over five centuries, worked by bound tenants who owed labour and a share of the crop. The second was trade, conducted with capital the monasteries held and often through agents in Kalimpong or Xining; wool, salt, tea, borax and musk all moved on monastic account.
The third was lending. Monasteries were the country's banks, and they lent at rates that in bad years compounded into permanent obligation. Debt could be inherited, and a family could work for generations against a loan taken by a grandfather. Melvyn Goldstein's fieldwork with pre-1959 estate populations recorded exactly this pattern in detail.
Against that, the monasteries also performed real functions: they were the only educational system, the principal source of medical care, the archive, the printing industry, and the mechanism by which surplus sons of poor families were fed. A household that could not support four boys sent two to the monastery, and the monastery took them. This was not merely extraction, and Tibetans at the time did not experience it as such.
The great houses and the government
Politically the three great Gelug monasteries around Lhasa — Sera, Drepung and Ganden, collectively the Three Seats — functioned as an estate of the realm. Their representatives sat in the Tsongdu, the national assembly, and no government could carry a serious measure against their combined opposition.
They used that position consistently and in one direction. When the thirteenth Dalai Lama tried after 1913 to build a standing army on modern lines, the army had to be paid for, and the only untaxed wealth in the country was monastic. Proposals to tax monastic estates were defeated in 1921 and again in 1924. When a group of British-trained officers began appearing in Western dress and were suspected of admiring what they had seen in India, the monastic party had them broken; Tsarong, the commander-in-chief and the ablest man in the government, was stripped of his military office in 1925.
The English school at Gyantse, opened in 1923 to train an administrative class, was closed in 1926 under monastic pressure on the grounds that it would corrupt the boys. A second attempt at an English school in Lhasa in 1944 lasted six months.
The reformer's dilemma
The thirteenth Dalai Lama understood the problem exactly. His Last Testament of 1933 is unambiguous: he warned that unless the country strengthened itself, the monasteries and the government would be destroyed, that officials would be enslaved, and that the population would face terror and misery. He named the Bolsheviks in Mongolia as the example.
He was also the head of the religious establishment whose privileges the reforms would have to touch, and he could not attack it without undermining the basis of his own authority. Every ruler of Tibet after 1642 faced this in some form. The Ganden Phodrang government was created by the monastic order and drew its legitimacy from it, and it could not become a modern state without ceasing to be itself.
What followed his death in 1933 was a regency, a succession of factional struggles, and a reversal of most of what he had built. The army was cut back. The school stayed shut. When the People's Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze in October 1950 the Tibetan force facing it numbered perhaps eight thousand men with a few hundred serviceable rifles per regiment and no artillery worth the name.
Afterwards
The monastic economy was dissolved between 1955 and 1959 in the east and after 1959 across central Tibet, by land reform carried out on the standard Chinese model: estates confiscated, debts cancelled, monasteries stripped of land and of the tenants who worked it.
That reform is the strongest card in Beijing's account of 1950, and it is not a weak one. What followed it — the famine of the Great Leap Forward years, and then the near-total destruction of the monasteries themselves in the Cultural Revolution — is why the card is not decisive. The institution that was reformed and the culture that was housed inside it were not separable in practice, and both were dismantled together.
Something like seventy monasteries were left standing out of roughly 2,700. The rebuilding since 1980 has restored the buildings, and the number of monks permitted in each is now set by the state.
End of Chapter V