The political historians of Tibet have tended to give the period 1933–49 short shrift on the grounds that nothing substantively interesting happened: the political crises were internal monastic affairs, the foreign-policy archive is thin, and the principal external event was a war that Tibet substantively sat out. The judgement is not unreasonable as a summary of the diplomatic record, but it understates the substantive social and economic history of the period — which was the high-water mark of the Ganden Phodrang's administration of the plateau and the only sustained period of effective Lhasa government over the entire territory from the 1793 Qing reorganisation to the 1950 invasion.
Wartime neutrality
The Tibetan government's formal position from 1937 to 1945 was strict neutrality between the belligerents of the East Asian theatre. The Japanese, who occupied substantial portions of eastern China from 1937 onwards and who briefly attempted a propaganda offensive toward the Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist communities in 1938-39 through the Mongolian-Tibetan Affairs Office at Hsinking (Changchun, the Manchukuo capital), were politely declined Tibetan engagement. The Chinese Nationalist Government, after its retreat to Chongqing in 1938, maintained its informal Lhasa mission and made repeated requests for permission to use Tibetan territory for an alternative supply route from the British Indian railhead at Kalimpong through Lhasa, Nagchu and Xining to Chongqing; the Lhasa government refused, on the grounds that Tibetan neutrality would be compromised.
The Allied governments respected Tibetan neutrality with substantial reluctance. The British Indian government, which had handled the bulk of Allied logistics in the China-Burma-India theatre, would have preferred Tibetan permission for the Lhasa route; the Tibetan refusal added approximately 1,800 miles to the Allied supply chain (the Burma Road and after 1942 the Hump airlift from Assam). The United States, after Pearl Harbor, attempted to negotiate the Lhasa route directly through the Tolstoy–Dolan mission of 1942, with similar lack of success. The Tibetan government's substantive position was that its survival depended on rigorous non-involvement, and that the war was not a war in which Tibet could afford to take sides.
The Tolstoy–Dolan mission
The Office of Strategic Services mission of Captain Ilia Tolstoy and Lieutenant Brooke Dolan to Lhasa in 1942-43 was the first and only formally accredited American mission to the Ganden Phodrang government before the Communist period. Tolstoy — a great-grandson of the novelist, then an American intelligence officer with substantial Russian and Tibetan-language background — and Dolan, a zoologist who had previously visited Tibetan-speaking areas of Sichuan, were dispatched by William Donovan's wartime intelligence service principally for the practical purpose of negotiating the trans-Tibetan supply route, and incidentally for the political-diplomatic purpose of establishing direct contact with the Tibetan government.
The mission entered Tibet from Sikkim in November 1942, was received with substantial formality at Lhasa in December, and remained as guests of the Tibetan government for three months. The mission produced a report (declassified in the 1970s) that constitutes one of the more detailed western descriptions of Lhasa government and society in the period: an estimate of the agricultural and pastoral population, the monastic establishment, the army, the budget, the trade routes, the political institutions, and the principal personalities. The substantive diplomatic result was negligible: the Tibetan government declined the supply-route proposal; President Roosevelt's letter of greeting from the United States was received but produced no formal American recognition; the only substantive result was that Tibet had hosted an American mission and received the equivalent of a letter from the President, which was a substantively new development in the country's external relations.
The monastic economy
The Ganden Phodrang's administrative economy in the period was a substantially feudal arrangement in which approximately 30 per cent of the cultivated land of central Tibet was held as monastic estates, approximately 25 per cent as aristocratic estates (the kudrak), and approximately 45 per cent as state lands administered directly by the central government's district officers. The estates were worked by hereditary serfs (miser) of three formal types: tre-ba (taxpayer households, the substantial peasant class), du-jung (smaller-tenant households without independent landholdings), and nang-zen (a small class of bonded household servants). The corvée labour obligations (the ulag) of the peasant population to the central government, the monastic estates and the aristocratic estates were substantial — typically four to six months of unpaid labour annually — and constituted the principal mechanism by which the political-economic system was sustained.
The judgement of this arrangement is one of the most politically contested in twentieth-century Tibetan historiography. The Chinese-Communist account, both in 1950s propaganda and in subsequent historical writing, has emphasised the substantial inequities of the system and the conditions of the serf population — and the empirical case is, on the surface, not implausible. The Tibetan-government and refugee accounts have emphasised the substantially distinct character of Tibetan serfdom from its European analogues, the social mobility that was in practice available through the monastic system, and the absence of the famine-and-revolt cycle that characterised pre-modern European agriculture. The historiographical literature since the 1970s, principally Goldstein's three-volume A History of Modern Tibet, has produced a substantially more granular picture in which the system was indeed substantially inequitable but also functionally stable, sustaining a population of approximately 1.5 million across the central plateau with a degree of nutritional security and demographic continuity that was, on the comparative standards of pre-modern Eurasian agriculture, not unusually poor.
The 1944 census
The most substantial single source for the administrative texture of the period is the partial census conducted by the central government in 1944, the surviving records of which were preserved in the Lhasa government archives and removed to Dharamsala in 1959-60. The census attempted a household-by-household enumeration of the eight central districts under direct Lhasa administration. The substantive findings — a total population estimate of approximately 1.2 million in the directly-administered area, an average household size of approximately 6 persons, a monastic-population share of approximately 12 per cent of the male population, an agricultural-pastoral-division of approximately 60–40 — constitute the most reliable demographic baseline for the Ganden Phodrang's administrative coverage.
The institutional architecture
The central government's institutional architecture in the period comprised: the Dalai Lama as head of state (during the interregnum, the Regent); the Kashag (the cabinet of four ministers, three lay and one ecclesiastical); the National Assembly (the Tsongdu, with a regular session of approximately 50 representatives and an extended session of approximately 350); the Yigtsang (the ecclesiastical secretariat); the Tsikhang (the lay secretariat); and the district officers (dzongpön) in the principal frontier and provincial districts. The army comprised approximately 5,000 men in seven regular regiments under a Commander-in-Chief (magji); the police force at Lhasa comprised approximately 200 men under a civilian commissioner. The state revenue, principally from agricultural taxation but supplemented by trade duties, salt and tea monopolies and monastic donations, was approximately 6 million Tibetan srang annually — equivalent on the contemporary exchange to approximately 1.5 million pre-war pounds sterling.
The system was administratively shallow by twentieth-century standards but it functioned. The country was governed; the law was enforced; the trade caravans crossed the passes without harassment; the monastic establishments received their endowments and trained their novices; the agricultural calendar was kept; the New Year celebrations of the Tibetan calendar were held annually at Lhasa with the full ceremonial. The country was, in the period 1933 to 1949, more stable, more prosperous and more substantively self-governing than at any earlier date in the modern period. The catastrophe that followed in 1949–51 was, in this sense, a catastrophe of an institutional system in working order, struck down from outside, rather than the collapse of an exhausted state. That distinction matters for the moral judgement of the events of the subsequent two years, to which we now turn.
End of Chapter VI