3 The First Explorers

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The First Explorers

 

On the outskirts of the Chinese city of Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, is a former shoe factory eight storeys high that now hosts one of the defining industries of the twenty-first century: genetics. BGI, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, moved here from the capital in 2007 after it fell out with its masters at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. With one foot in academia and the other in business, it was too strange for the conservative capital: a mixture of state-owned and private enterprise. Yet the company is now the biggest player in the world of genetic sequencing, gobbling up American competitors and employing four thousand people. Those eight storeys are full of DNA sequencing machines and the data farm required to harvest the colossal amounts of information produced. Apart from human beings, including the first full sequencing of an Asian, BGI has sequenced all kinds of things: strains of rice, the cucumber, the chickpea, the giant panda, the Arabian camel, the yak and forty types of silkworm, the latter to protect China’s all-important silk industry. It has also sequenced the DNA of Tibetans.

The indigenous people of the Tibetan plateau are of immense interest to

geneticists and evolutionary biologists because of their unique adaptation to the physiological challenges of living permanently at altitudes of over four thousand metres with only half the oxygen of sea level. A few other populations around the world have adapted genetically to this challenge: there are two in the uplands of Ethiopia. But no population has done it quite like Tibetans and other ethnic groups with Tibetan heritage, such as the Sherpa of Nepal. Those of us born at normal altitudes, when confronted with the task of surviving on half the air, produce a cascade of physiological responses, starting with increased breathing and a faster heart rate. Over time, the blood thickens with extra haemoglobin in red blood cells. Whether this is what we mean by acclimatisation, or is actually a problematic by-product, is a matter of debate for some researchers. Haemoglobin makes your blood sticky, causing stroke; long-term elevation can lead to chronic illness and heart attack. Tibetans manage to function perfectly well at altitude with haemoglobin levels that are sometimes lower than lowland populations. Their respiration and heart rates are also similar.

Modern genetics and the mapping of the human genome have allowed us

to at least start to unpick the complex interactions and adaptations that make Tibetans so successful at altitude, from how blood vessels function in their muscles to changes in the upper respiratory tract that lets Tibetan noses breathe more easily in the thin, dry air of high altitude. Researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and Wenzhou Medical University found nine separate genetic differences between Tibetans and lowland populations, including genes connected with haemoglobin levels and the immune system.

The most critical issue is reproduction. You can only pass on your genes

if your children survive. I once met a newly born infant in the arms of his mother in a yak-hair tent at over four and a half thousand metres in the middle of the Tibetan plateau. It was a humbling experience. There was no hospital within eighty kilometres and no midwife either. The little boy’s mother had relied on her mother to help her with childbirth, but his rude health was also a product of natural selection. Tibetan women have evolved larger uterine arteries to maintain a healthy flow of oxygen to the growing foetus. Tibetan babies are born at the same weight as lowland babies but are able to extract more oxygen from the air. The birth weight of lowland babies born at altitude reduces by a hundred grams for every thousand metres of height gained. Tibetan mothers also have genetic differences that allow them to produce more folates, an essential B-vitamin, when they’re pregnant.

These discoveries deepen our understanding of history too. The ability of

one group of people rather than another to thrive at high altitude is one of the organising principles in the story of the Himalaya. Trekking up valleys on the south side of the range into the high mountains, you come across an obvious ethnic switch between people from the southern lowlands of the subcontinent and South East Asia and people of the Tibetan high plateau, an invisible threshold that hovers at around 3,500 metres. North of this genetic suture line are people most often and loosely termed Bhotias, people of Bod or Bhot, the Tibetan name for Tibet. (The etymology of ‘Tibet’ is uncertain; one theory has it as a Turkic corruption of tu phod, a term from north-eastern Tibet for upper Tibet.) South of this line, and east on the lowlands of China, are populations that lack the genetic adaptations to live and thrive comfortably at altitude. Yet this differentiation doesn’t quite match any modern border between states; those run most usually along the crest of the mountains. This ethnic misalignment has been a source of political tension in recent centuries. After the Second World War, newly communist China briefly laid claim to those parts of the Himalaya with Tibetan populations that were governed by India and Nepal.

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Not surprisingly, given the current political context in which Tibet is such

contested territory, research into the origins of the Tibetan people is dangerous ground; it’s hard to imagine a more controversial context in which to pursue research. In 2010, the highly regarded journal Science published research that claimed to have found the fastest known example of human evolution in the shape of the Tibetan people. The research was then reported in newspapers around the world. The lead authors, Xin Yi and Jian Wang, both worked for the Beijing Genomics Institute. The paper claimed that the specific genetic differences between Tibetans and Han Chinese occurred only three thousand years ago. The previous fastest known genetic change had been tolerance for lactose among northern Europeans some 7,500 years ago. For those pushing a nationalist narrative making Tibet part of the Chinese motherland the implication of this research seemed obvious: the Tibetan people were an offshoot of the Han population that split within the timeframe of recorded history. To archaeologists, the claim made little or no sense. Mark Aldenderfer, an expert in the prehistory of Tibet at the University of California, Merced told the New York Times that the time frame proposed was ‘simply not tenable by anything we know from the historical, archaeological or linguistic record’. While the archaeological picture on the Tibetan plateau is far less complete than on the south side of the Himalaya, there was certainly sufficient evidence to challenge directly the notion that continuous human habitation was as young as the scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute claimed.

Apart from altitude, a key factor in the peopling of Tibet was climate.

Around fifty thousand years ago, the Tibetan plateau was dry and cold: vegetation would have been sparse and the mountains heavily glaciated. Then the climate improved with a rise in rainfall and an increase in temperature. Flourishing grasslands encouraged an expansion in the range and numbers of ungulates native to the plateau: wild yaks; chiru, the Tibetan antelope; khyang, the wild ass; and species of wild sheep. This warmer and wetter period extended north of the plateau to the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts, making migration from the north more likely. Evidence for this includes stone tools found at around 3,100 metres in the Tsaidam basin, an extensive shelf on the north-eastern corner of the plateau, dated at over thirty thousand years old. Closer to the Himalayan chain, eighty kilometres north of Lhasa, is Chusang, a late Palaeolithic site discovered in 1995. At an altitude of 4,200 metres, a series of nineteen human hand and footprints have been preserved in travertine, a sedimentary rock that forms from mineral deposits around hot springs. All the prints were made at the same time when the travertine was still a soft, calcite mud: a snapshot of a family group perhaps, since some of the prints are small enough to be made by children. All sorts of people declare themselves to be explorers; this band, you feel, really were. They faced all the problems of the early European and Asian explorers – the cold, the thin air and brutal wind – but without their technologies or scientific knowledge.

Quartz in these travertine deposits can be dated with some accuracy, and

these prints are believed to be around twenty thousand years old. At other sites across the Tibetan plateau, stone tools have been found which, while they cannot be dated, are believed to be even older than the Chusang prints. It was clear that what was known about early Tibet from an archaeological record dating back at least twenty thousand years didn’t match claims from geneticists about a much more recent divergence from China’s population. Could they be different groups of people? Perhaps the warmer and wetter climate these early settlers enjoyed grew colder and more arid as the last ‘ice age’, more accurately the Last Glacial Maximum, approached twenty thousand years ago. Perhaps whoever it was living on the plateau had migrated or died, to be replaced by new migrants from China as the plateau warmed again some ten thousand years ago.

In the last few years, this fragmentary picture has filled out considerably,

with new and more robust genetic research filling in many gaps, supported by new archaeological discoveries, particularly at the oldest site found so far, on the banks of the Salween river in south-east Tibet. Here stone tools and animal remains have been dated to between thirty-one and thirty-eight thousand years ago. Not only does this new work support the idea that Tibetans have been settled on the plateau for tens of thousands of years, it also fits new genetic evidence that their presence was continuous, despite the worsening climate of the last glacial period. This evidence has some startling implications for our species as a whole.

In 2014, BGI published new research on genetic sequences of Tibetans

they had looked at previously, this time comparing them with the same sequences from a wide range of modern and archaic humans. The results were startling. A sequence they had previously identified as significantly different from those of lowlander populations was found in only one other sample: that of the archaic human species dubbed Denisovan. Until recently, we had only the little finger bone of one individual of this hominin, found in a cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia. The bone belonged to a girl who lived 41,000 years ago, when different human subspecies lived side by side. Sequencing her genome has shown that Denisovans had interbred with Neanderthals. Now it appeared modern humans had as well. In 2019, anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute at Leipzig published a paper on a second Denisovan find: a jawbone found in a cave in Gansu province, placing Denisovans on the Tibetan plateau itself.

In September 2016, a team from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological

Sciences published research that made a broader and deeper analysis of Tibetan DNA. They were the first researchers to sequence the entire genome of a Tibetan, in fact thirty-eight of them, including Sherpas. They then compared the results with the entire genomes of Han Chinese and with available genetic data from other modern and archaic humans. Their results showed that around six per cent of the Tibetan gene pool was composed of archaic sequences, including the Denisovan DNA found previously. That’s substantially more than the percentage of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans. They also found a segment that connected Tibetans to a modern human population living in Siberia 45,000 years ago, the so-called Ust’-Ishim man, whose fossilised thighbone gave up sufficient genetic material for the genome to be sequenced. As it turns out, Tibetans have more genetic material in common with Ust’-Ishim than any other modern population, including modern Siberians. They concluded that the earliest Tibetan settlers carried the genes of all three hominins, that Tibetans had arrived on the plateau between sixty-two and thirty-eight thousand years ago, but that the bulk of their genes was far more modern, around twelve to ten thousand years old, as the last glacial period ended.

The complexity of these discoveries has allowed a fuller, though far from

complete, story of the settlement of the Tibetan plateau to emerge. Having migrated from North Asia and settled on the plateau during the Palaeolithic, Tibet’s human population, surviving at high altitude for hundreds of generations, faced twenty thousand years ago the brutal prospect of a cooling climate. It was once thought the plateau was covered in ice during the Last Glacial Maximum but this is now discounted. While the plateau has an average altitude of over four and a half kilometres, there are many places less exposed and somewhat lower in altitude where populations could survive, such as the big river valleys. No doubt many groups migrated or died out, but some remained in these sheltered sanctuaries. When the climate became warmer and less arid again, plant and animal species extended their range once more across the plateau. Neolithic populations, speaking proto-Tibeto-Burmese languages, migrated from the upper Yangtze river in modern Sichuan and from the more northerly province of Gansu onto the Tibetan plateau where they encountered small indigenous bands with a very particular genetic inheritance. Far greater in number, these new arrivals interbred with the existing population and acquired those genes that conferred the biggest advantage: the ability to live and successfully reproduce in a hypoxic environment.

Western writers are sometimes guilty of romanticising the links between

Tibetan culture and the physical environment, but it’s true to say that Tibet’s high altitude has had a profound impact not just on Tibetan physiology but on its history too. Until the twentieth century, when China used modern warfare, technology and infrastructure to extend its reach permanently to the northern edge of the Himalaya, the genetic adaptation to altitude Tibetans enjoyed was their greatest defence. Tibet experienced invasions from lowlanders over the centuries, but maintaining a permanent presence required more resources from the invaders than the rewards justified; the hardships of life at high altitude were too unpalatable. In the course of Tibetan history, several foreign armies would struggle to feed themselves.

What Tibet had to offer could be acquired more easily through trade,

which was vibrant and transformative. Culture and ideas, Buddhism for example, could and did flow uphill to high altitude. The notion of a mythical, isolated Tibet is just that: a myth. As historian Sam van Schaik wrote, Tibet has been ‘deeply involved with other cultures throughout its history’. For actual living people, though, such involvement was harder. Permanent occupation by a lowland population, specifically Han Chinese, has required modern obstetrics and a determined, often ruthless political will. Even now, the infant mortality rate for Han Chinese here is three times the rate for Tibetans.

If the Tibetan genome tells an eloquent story, the archaeological record of

how Tibet emerged from the last ‘ice age’ ten thousand years ago is sparse. Almost all the earliest sites whose age have been measured date from around five thousand years ago, mostly along the eastern margins of the plateau but some in what would become the first crucible of historic Tibetan identity, the Yarlung Tsangpo valley, very much in the Himalayan region. Before that, there are little more than hints, assemblages of stone tools that suggest cultural differences, particularly between south Tibet and the arid, rolling hills of the Chang Tang in the north, where people have historically and through necessity been more nomadic. The idea of different cultures on the plateau is important. In the popular imagination, Tibet and Buddhism are synonymous. The Dalai Lama’s high profile in exile and his place at the centre of Tibetan identity make that assumption inevitable. But Buddhism wasn’t first established in Tibet until the seventh and eighth centuries, long after Christianity arrived in Europe and more than a thousand years after the Buddha lived. It was draped, like sheer fabric, over the complex and varied cultures that had developed and endured for centuries. With Buddhism came literacy; before Buddhism there was no Tibetan script. This watershed moment has dominated not just Western understanding of Tibet but Tibet’s sense of itself: creating a narrative from a voiceless world requires considerable ingenuity.

The earliest known Neolithic culture on the Tibetan plateau is found at its

easternmost edge near Chamdo, third largest city in the Tibet Autonomous Region and close to the border with China’s Sichuan province. Kharub, often Sinicised to Karou, is a collection of domestic residences representing several periods of occupation between six and four thousand years ago. The later structures excavated at Kharub look, at least from the interpretation of Chinese archaeologists, remarkably similar to a vernacular still common throughout rural Tibet. The site is on a bench above the Dza Chu river, which becomes the Mekong, at around 3,100 metres. As well as remains of wild goats and deer and evidence of foraging, there’s evidence that millet was cultivated at Kharub and that people there experimented to achieve the best yields in the thin air of high altitude, where it’s possible to grow only a narrow selection of cereal crops. There’s evidence too of domesticated pigs.

Another site further west, Chugong, on the north side of Lhasa’s Kyi Chu

valley, is up to four thousand years old and also shows evidence of animal husbandry, including yak, which evolved, like Tibetans themselves, to prosper at high altitude. Yaks are a totemic creature in Tibetan culture, but until Chugong the first evidence of them in this area came from much later, in a document from the Western Zhou dynasty dating from 850 bce. Tibetans learned to use every part of the yak productively, as Inuit do the seal, its bones carved into buttons or combs, the characteristic yak belly fringe providing the best hair for tent ropes. Yak tails were of particular value and were traded cross the Himalaya and far beyond. Roman women were using yak-hair flywhisks at the time of the Emperor Domitian in the first century. In south-western Tibet, the Mahabharata describes trade from Tibet in gold and precious stones; it’s inconceivable that goods and technologies didn’t travel the other way, into Tibet from neighbouring regions on the other side of the Himalaya: Kinnaur and Garhwal, and across Ladakh to the plateau. This region of Tibet acquired domesticated crops in this way, especially wheat, barley and peas, but the archaeology here is even scarcer than in the east. In north-western Tibet, archaeological finds suggest the influence of pre-Scythian tribes, the culture of the steppe extending to the plateau, of which more later.

A huge number and variety of objects were recovered from Kharub,

ceramic bowls and jars with geometric patterns, polished stone and exquisite bone tools: awls and needles, weaving tools and combs. There were plenty of decorative objects too, including jade pins, shells and perforated stone jewellery. These and artefacts from Chugong are on display at the Tibet Museum in Lhasa. One of the exhibits from Kharub stopped me in my tracks when I saw it for myself: a series of nine semi-precious stones strung together and featuring a malachite pendant. There was also a polished cylindrical bead of turquoise, and another of what looked like jade, perhaps from ancient mines in the Tarim basin. There was no interpretation on the exhibit but what it illustrated was obvious: cultural continuity between the ancient past and the present. In the seventh century, for example, according to Chinese chronicles, the rank of Tibetan ministers could be judged from their insignia: different-sized beads hanging from string at their shoulders. The most precious, more than gold or silver, was turquoise. Nothing has changed. The fragments in the museum echo a motif and style that fills the shop windows of jewellery stores in modern Lhasa. Plenty of cultures revisit prehistoric art for inspiration; in Tibet it never went away.

As with writing, Buddhism marked a watershed in Tibet’s artistic

traditions. When we think of Tibetan art, it’s most probably the complex and beautiful murals and elegant statuary of Tibetan Buddhism, which date back as far as the eighth century. This tradition drew its aesthetic from India, particularly from the Buddhist centres of the Pala dynasty in Bengal and Kashmir. Its arrival in Tibet reflected a sea change in religious practice and political power. What preceded it was radically different: the art of the people, not religious specialists, reflecting a kind of everyday spiritual awareness that mediated the worlds of hunting and pastoralism. Its inspirations were local gods and the rituals of the passing seasons.

Tibet’s rock art offers the most immediate insights into this preliterate

culture. The museum has plenty of examples on display. The most popular figurative subjects, commonly painted in red ochre, or tsak, were wild animals, particularly ungulates: yaks, complete with belly fringe, and deer, the two most commonly featured species and both widely present as keystones in the shamanistic spirit world that predated Buddhism. Predators also featured: tigers and lions. The natural world is a central theme, as you would expect when survival depends on it. There are pictographs of hunters on horseback drawing bows, sitting on saddles that are similar in style to ones still used on the Tibetan plateau, although stirrups arrived only with the Turkic tribes in the fifth century.

Cosmological symbols are also common: the sun and moon, but also the

swastika in both its clockwise and counterclockwise form, which appeared in the Indus valley fifteen hundred years before the Buddha was born. Many of these symbols were absorbed into Tibetan Buddhism, just as animistic totems were into the early Christian church. They feature in thangkas, Buddhist religious paintings, alongside srungma, protective spirits that are distinctive to Tibetan Buddhism. The meaning of this iconography evolved as Tibet itself changed but the process of recruiting to Buddhism the symbols and rituals of a pre-existing system of belief is clear. Some aspects were undoubtedly lost, though: pre-Buddhist imagery sometimes shows arrows jutting from the flanks of wild yaks, not a scene repeated in Buddhist iconography, with hunting frowned upon. Others may be rooted in this preliterate art, for example gods riding on yaks. The discovery of the earliest thangkas painted with red ochre in the Mogao Caves on the Silk Road hints at the continuity from Tibet’s preliterate view of the universe to a wholly new one based on Buddhist philosophy. The old world was full of demons and visions; the new was austere and thoughtful. Tension between them has remained a constant and often creative dynamic in Tibetan culture and religious practice ever since.

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Documents found in the Mogao Caves, the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, dominate our understanding of early Tibetan history, like a welcome landmark emerging from the mist. The caves are near Dunhuang, far to the north of the Himalaya, on the edge of the Gobi desert in what is now Gansu province. Dunhuang was a Han dynasty garrison that became a supply point for camel trains on the Silk Road, a junction between its northern and southern routes, and a crossroads for travellers between Mongolia and India. It was a Buddhist city by the fourth century, with a population of tens of thousands, when the first caves were dug at Mogao, elaborately painted with visual aids to meditation and paid for by wealthy patrons. The site was a major Chinese Buddhist centre during the Tang dynasty, at its height in the eighth and ninth centuries, by which time hundreds of caves had been dug and decorated; its Buddhist priests escaped persecution after the Tang turned against foreign religions in the 840s only because the city was by then a possession of the Tibetan Empire. As Islam conquered much of Central Asia, the caves were abandoned. When the Yuan dynasty, patrons of Tibetan Buddhism, collapsed in the fourteenth century, the city itself went into decline. Growth in sea trade had fatally weakened the Silk Roads, until President Xi Jinping revived the idea in the twenty-first century.

Even after much of the complex was abandoned, though, Mogao

remained a site of worship. In the late nineteenth century, Wang Yuanlu, an itinerant Taoist monk from Shanxi province, settled there and became the site’s unofficial guardian, raising money for restoration. In 1900, as workmen he’d hired were clearing sand from the entrance to one cave they discovered a hidden door to another. This cave was filled with thousands of ancient documents, the youngest of which dated from the early eleventh century. Excavated as a memorial chapel for a monk called Hongbian who died in the ninth century, it is now better known as the Library Cave. The reason it was walled off with documents hidden inside has intrigued scholars. One explanation is that this was an attempt to hide them from invaders at the time of the defeat of the nearby Buddhist Khotan kingdom in 1006 at the hands of the Muslim Karakhanids. (‘We came down on them like a flood,’ wrote the Turkic scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari. ‘We went out among their cities, / We tore down the idol-temples, / We shat on the Buddha’s head!’) Khotan had been a Buddhist kingdom for more than a thousand years, dating back to the time of the Indian Buddhist emperor Ashok and the Greeks in Central Asia. By the end of the eleventh century, Khotanese had been almost entirely replaced by the Turkic language of their conquerors. When Marco Polo visited in the late thirteenth century, he reported that all Khotan’s inhabitants were Muslim.

Wang Yuanglu made repeated attempts to interest local Chinese

authorities in his discovery but various officials who saw documents from the Library Cave failed to understand their significance. In 1907, the Hungarian-born British archaeologist and explorer Aurel Stein visited Dunhuang with his capable interpreter and secretary Jiang Xiaowan. Stein’s description of the cave hints at the riches inside: he estimated 230 bundles of Chinese scrolls and 80 Tibetan bundles, each containing around a dozen scrolls. He counted eleven large volumes of Tibetan pothi-style books, narrowly rectangular in shape and loosely bound, between traditional wooden covers. The pile of manuscripts and scrolls was ten feet high and occupied a space of five hundred square feet. The papers had no catalogue and were often scrambled together.

Stein paid Wang Yuanglu to let him take away ‘over thirty compact

bundles of scrolls’ and various other miscellaneous bundles. The books he left, guessing they were reiterations of just one or two sutras, or scriptures. The following year the French scholar Paul Pelliot arrived at Dunhuang to pick over what Stein had left. Pelliot could read classical Chinese and other Central Asian languages and was thus able to make a fast and detailed assessment of what remained. (He was also a student of the Sanskrit scholar Sylvain Lévi, a crucial figure in Himalayan antiquity.) Even then the treasures of the Library Cave weren’t exhausted. Japanese travellers bought more in 1911 and Aurel Stein returned in 1914 to buy what Wang Yuanglu promised was the last of the treasures. Stein suspected the monk was lying and he was right: a few months later the Russian archaeologist Sergei Oldenburg bought a large number of Chinese and Tibetan scrolls, now in St Petersburg. Oldenburg, whose friendship with Lenin’s brother protected him after the Russian Revolution, founded an authoritative index of Buddhist texts that continues today. There was still a mass of documents left behind, many in Tibetan, and the great majority of these are now in Dunhuang Museum, rivalling the British and French collections in terms of size; these and other collections are now coordinated through the International Dunhuang Project.

Buddhist texts of comparable importance were discovered at other sites,

but Dunhuang was among the most important discoveries of ancient texts anywhere in the world. They transformed our understanding of Asian religions. Most of the fifty thousand manuscripts are in Chinese, but other languages are present, including Tibetan, Uighur, Sanskrit and Khotanese, the latter hardly known until the Library Cave’s discovery. Most of the material is Buddhist, and includes canonical works, like the famous Diamond Sutra from 868, the earliest printed book for which we have a date, now in the British Library. The Diamond Sutra is part of the Prajnaparamita, a Sanskrit term meaning ‘perfection of wisdom’. Its Sanskrit title is Vajracchedika, which literally means ‘diamond cutter’ or ‘thunderbolt cutter’, a metaphor for its value as a tool in reaching central truths within Buddhist philosophy: the self as illusion and liberation from attachment. The Dunhuang texts aren’t confined to Buddhism, however. There is a manual for the ancient game of Go, musical scores, works on mathematics and astronomy, texts from other religions, including Christianity (the so-called Jesus Sutras), and Manichaeanism, treatises on medicine and Chinese pharmacology, as well as texts on Tibet’s history.

The Dunhuang documents also include material on the esoteric tantric

Buddhism so popular in Tibet towards the end of the first millennium, material until recently overlooked in comparison to other treasures from the Library Cave. Tantric Buddhism, Vajrayana in Sanskrit, emerged in northern India in the early medieval period, practised by mahasiddha, ‘great adepts’, spiritual practitioners who pioneered a faster route to enlightenment by quitting their monasteries and sacred vows to live in caves and forests, like Hindu sannyasi, or renunciates, but also behaving in ways anathema to the philosophical elites they left behind, having sex, drinking alcohol and eating meat. Only by experiencing the actuality of ordinary life could its emptiness be properly understood. The Tibetan Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has described these adepts as ‘psychonauts’, explorers of the furthest reaches not of the world but of the mind.

The Western imagination is transfixed with the sexual aspects of tantric

practice, but while it’s there, it is only a fragment from a much wider system of teaching. The eleventh century Bengali mahasiddha Tilopa, having been thrown out of his monastery, made his money grinding sesame seeds for their oil – til is Sanskrit for oil – and worked as a bouncer and procurer for a prostitute. Later, however, Tilopa became an itinerant and highly admired teacher, whose students included Naropa, among the founders of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, an umbrella term covering a range of tantric teachings. As characters, mahasiddha were wildly romantic, growing their hair long and abandoning the distant austerity of more conventional practitioners. They rose to prominence during the Pala dynasty, the last Buddhist empire to rule a large part of India, but they also shared with Hindu Shaivites (followers of Shiva) some of their spiritual profile and practices. This confluence of the faster-running tributaries of Buddhism and Hinduism remains a major cultural feature of the Newari community in Kathmandu, that city’s human core: intense, mystical, sometimes dark. Centuries after Buddhism had faded in India, Tibetan scholars would still be trying to figure out what tantric practice really implied.

Piecing together the emergence of the Tibetan state, a process that began

in the seventh century, is far from simple. When the British diplomat Charles Bell published one of the first Western accounts of early Tibetan history in 1924, he drew in particular on the Blue Annals, completed in 1476, centuries after the events they described. And as Bell himself observed, Tibetan historiography was usually more concerned with the progress of religion and its institutions, not the rise and fall of rival political factions or economic development. Following the dharma or spiritual path of Buddhism has been a largely cohesive force on the plateau of Tibet for a thousand years but it wasn’t inevitable, even if those Tibetan histories make it seem so. What we do know is that a dynasty emerged from Tibet’s Yarlung valley in the seventh century that dominates the historical landscape, and it was largely in the wake of its emergence that, over the next two centuries, Buddhism took root. Remarkably, what began as illiterate animist clans making fragmentary appearances in Chinese chronicles, feuding in a remote backwater, became, within a few generations, an empire that stretched from the Pamir mountains in the far west to northern Myanmar in the east, and from the Gobi in the north to Nepal in the south, with a brief occupation of China’s Tang dynasty capital at Chang’an. This stratospheric rise of the Yarlung dynasty transformed Tibetan culture and gave Tibet its own alphabet; only then was the way opened to its future as a holy land, where Buddhism prospered even as it dwindled in India, in the face of expansionist Islam and resurgent Hinduism.

Two key sources found at Dunhuang transformed our understanding of

this critical period, as Tibet emerged on the world stage. The Tibetan Annals, originally one scroll, now held in two portions in London and Paris, covers the early reign of Songtsen Gampo, ‘Songtsen the Wise’, the first Tibetan emperor, recording important events and genealogies, including clan affiliations, from the middle of the seventh century to the year 764, when the fragments Stein and Pelliot brought back to Europe end. The second document is known as the Old Tibetan Chronicle, a potent blend of narrative, songs and various lists that tells the story of the Tibetan emperors from their mythical beginnings, through the reign of Songtsen Gampo, and on into the ninth century. The list of emperors named ends with U Dumtsen, also known as Langdarma, an equivocal figure in the Tibetan imagination, as someone who attempted to suppress Buddhism. The chronicle was most likely composed in the ninth century, although the Hungarian scholar Géza Uray believed the manuscript, written on chopped-up segments of a Chinese scroll, had been rearranged later for political reasons. The discovery of these sources gave scholars a powerful new vantage point from which to view Tibet’s emergence as a major power in Central Asia, one not so cluttered with Tibet’s later religious sense of itself. Charles Bell, for example, followed Tibet’s later medieval histories in regarding Songtsen Gampo as an ardent supporter of Buddhism, a young king converted by his foreign wives who ordered monasteries built across the land. He is known as the first of the three ‘dharma kings’, and regarded as an emanation of Tibet’s protective deity Avalokitesvara, Chenrezig in Tibetan, the Buddha of compassion. But there is no mention in either the Old Tibetan Chronicle or the Tibetan Annals of Songtsen Gampo having been a Buddhist at all.

Songtsen was born a tsenpo – a king – and a lhase, or divine son, thirty-

third in a line of kings whose origins are lost in time and whose gods are largely forgotten. The first of them was Nyatri Tsenpo, dropped to earth on Yarlha Shampo, a sacred mountain in the Yarlung valley, on the end of a sky-cord that drew him back to heaven when his time came. The Tibetan calendar and Losar, the New Year, are said to have begun with his reign. An ancient fortress called Yumbu Lhakang that stands on a cliff above the Yarlung valley is traditionally associated with Nyatri. It is certainly old, a narrow white tower, windowless at the bottom, overlooking the fields that sustained its inhabitants. The chronicles tell how this sequence of kings lost its divinity through the foolish behaviour of the tsenpo Drigum who turned clan chiefs first against each other and then against himself. The sky-cord was severed forever and Drigum was buried in the ground. No one, including the great Dalai Lamas, ruled all Tibet without managing the concerns of the clans.

Songtsen himself died in 649 and the account of his funeral offers clues

to the nomadic origins of the Yarlung kings, hinting at influences from neither India nor China but the steppe. Herodotus had heard how the Scythians lacerated their bodies as part of their mourning; Tibetan nobles did the same, painting their faces with ochre and cutting off their hair. Echoes of the steppe accompanied Songtsen to his burial place, shaped like a nomad’s tent. Like the nearby Turkic peoples, the Tibetans believed their king lived on inside his tomb, surrounded with his things from life, seated in his copper coffin, his old servants close at hand, those who had sworn allegiance raising a stone pillar and swearing an oath.

If his death was rooted in the past, Songtsen’s life transformed that of the

plateau. His father Namri Lontsen had extended their clan’s power, forging links with other clans, expanding their control into central Tibet. During his reign, Namri had sent ambassadors to the Chinese court and made alliances with the powers that surrounded him: Zhang Zhung to the west and to the north-east a confederacy of tribes known as the Azha in Tibetan, and Tuyuhun to the Chinese, expert horse-breeders inhabiting what would become part of the Tibetan province of Amdo. This region was of much more concern to China, then emerging from chaos under the new Tang dynasty. To the south, across the mountains in the fertile valley of Kathmandu, was the Licchavi king, Amshuverma, controlling an important trans-Himalayan trade route and building a fabulous palace with the proceeds. The people he ruled were already famous for their metalwork. Beyond Amshuverma was the Indian king Harsha, who, aged just sixteen, had inherited the throne from his murdered brother, avenging his death and creating an empire.

Songtsen would do something similar. After his father was poisoned, he

inherited the title of tsenpo aged just thirteen. Reacting to the loss of a strong leader, the affiliated clans rose up. Songtsen responded quickly, capturing and executing the man who had killed his father and putting down the insurrection against his family. Where his father had been content to secure treaties, Songtsen wanted absolute control. He subjugated the west and in 634 sent envoys to the Chinese court. Songtsen’s reputation as a capable and bellicose military leader had gone before him, so the Chinese reciprocated quickly, being preoccupied with better known rivals, the Turks and the Azha to the north. China’s experienced emperor Taizong saw potential in recruiting Songtsen as an ally against the Azha. The Tibetans were delighted; such diplomatic respect raised their status.

Knowing that Taizong had promised Chinese noblewomen as brides to

the rulers of the Turks and the Azha, Songtsen sent another envoy to Taizong requesting the same. It was an astute act of statecraft on both sides, a mark of respect to the rising Tibetan king, but also an obligation to the Chinese emperor. At first the Chinese agreed, but at the insistence of the Azha ruler, Murong Nuohebo, who happened to be at court, the offer was withdrawn. Songtsen was furious and immediately launched a powerful attack on the Azha, his army reinforced with troops from his recent conquests in the west, scattering his enemies. Within a few years, Tibet would add this vast region to its empire. Songtsen then continued to the frontier with China at Sungchou, modern Songpan, some three hundred kilometres north of Chengdu, and sent gifts to the emperor, saying he had come for his princess. Without waiting for a reply, he then attacked the city.

What happened next depends on whose annals you read. The Tang

chroniclers claim a Chinese general drove Songtsen back. Tibetan chroniclers suggest the tsenpo withdrew his army in the face of a larger force and continued harrying Taizong’s armies. The latter seems more plausible. If Songtsen had been defeated, as the Tang claimed, they would not have so readily entertained Songtsen’s renewed demand for a bride. In 641 he sent his shrewdest counsellor, Gar Tongtsen, to the Tang capital at Chang’an, the city of perpetual peace, to negotiate the marriage. Chang’an was then the greatest city in the world, with a population of a million inside its city walls and two million outside. Chang’an had scores of Buddhist and Taoist temples, but it was ecumenical and tolerant, with Nestorian Christian churches and Zoroastrian temples as well. There were pleasure gardens with a lake you could boat on and festivals to entertain the people. Taizong had recently built a palace in his hunting park north of the city. There was a fascination too for the exotic: Turkic styles were then all the rage. People from all over the known world came to Chang’an, Japanese pilgrims and Jewish traders. The city brimmed with self-confidence. Its famous markets, at the end of the Silk Roads, sold everything anyone wanted.

Given the wealth on display at court and the disdain Chinese elites

expressed towards ‘barbarians’, and that by force of circumstance Gar Tongtsen was illiterate, it says a great deal that Songtsen’s ambassador impressed Taizong. There is an image of their encounter, the original painted by the government official Yan Liben, hanging in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Gar is shown in red and gold Chinese silks, hands pressed together, in front of Taizong, who is being carried on an open sedan chair by nine servant women, all identical. Even if Gar impressed Taizong, the power dynamic Yan Liben conveys is clear: Gar is a supplicant from a weaker power. Later Tibetan histories expanded on his reputation for cleverness, how he outfoxed the Chinese to bring home not just Songtsen’s bride but one for himself as well. Gar Tongtsen’s wiliness appeals to Tibetans, who have often relied on their wits to overcome such a vast numerical disadvantage. (‘There is no disputing the matter of numbers,’ Gar Tongtsen’s son once told an arrogant Chinese general. ‘But many small birds are the food of a single hawk, and many small fish are the food of a single otter.’)

The girl Gar brought home was a young teenage princess called

Wencheng, not Taizong’s daughter, but a relative from a junior noble family. The annals suggest she was intended for Songtsen’s son and heir, and it was only because his son died young that Songtsen married her himself. In doing so, he achieved a peace that lasted for a decade or more after his death in 649. Among the gifts Wencheng brought with her was a statue of the Buddha, the first recorded in Tibet, although there were most probably Buddhists in Tibet already. Her story is used in modern Chinese schools as a clumsy illustration of China’s deep-rooted connection to Tibet, a big uncle guiding a little nephew, with Tibet a tributary of the motherland. The reality was very different: these were powerfully different cultures, from how they conceived the world to what they ate and how they drank their tea. Songtsen is often credited as introducing Tibet to its favourite beverage, but recent archaeological discoveries suggest tea had been in Tibet for centuries before his reign. This might explain how wholly different its preparation is from tea drunk in China: salt and butter are blended into it, and the tea itself arrives in a dried, brick form, useful for nomadic lifestyles.

Even so, as its empire grew, Tibet’s interactions with China changed its

culture. This shift is neatly illustrated in the change of name of Songtsen’s new capital, from Rasa, meaning ‘walled place’, to Lhasa: ‘place of the gods’. Like elite families across Central Asia, Tibetan aristocrats sent their sons to Chang’an to be educated and to see what the rest of the world had to offer; they returned with new ideas and tastes. Through his ambassador Gar, Songtsen asked Taizong for silkworms and the techniques for making wine. Most importantly, understanding very well the power of the written word, he asked for artisans to teach Tibet how to make paper and ink. That allowed government to be regularised and properly constituted. The very existence of the annals at Dunhuang illustrates the impact the Chinese had on the Tibetan elite, which absorbed the Chinese habit of recording itself, an interesting contrast to the subcontinent, where literature was more metaphysical.

For historians, Tang records and Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang are

powerful documentary sources. Yet their focus on matters of state and military rivalry make it easy to underplay the immense cultural influence from the south side of the Himalaya, which was closer than China and a longstanding source of trade and cultural contact. Throughout the 630s, the king of the Kathmandu valley (in modern-day Nepal), Narendradeva, a descendant of the Licchavi king Amshuverma, took refuge in Lhasa to escape a coup, and spent several years there plotting his return. Part of the legend of Songtsen’s reign is that he had not one but two foreign wives, the first of them being a Nepali bride, a daughter of Amshuverma, the princess Bhrikuti. According to legend, like Wencheng she also brought a statue of the Buddha to the marriage. Many scholars have doubted her existence – there is no mention of her in the Dunhuang manuscripts – but another marriage into an important neighbouring elite is entirely plausible. It’s certainly the case that Narendradeva, who wore an amulet of the Buddha, returned to Kathmandu with support from Tibetan troops, which is why, the Tang recorded, he was subject to Lhasa. The impact of these Licchavi nobles on the Tibetan court hasn’t left the same record as China did, but it must still have been significant. Amshuverma had worked on a Sanskrit grammar, according to the famous Chinese Buddhist monk and traveller Xuanzang. That must have interested Songtsen. When it came to inventing a script for his language, Songtsen would turn to Sanskrit, much as a medieval European scholar would turn to Latin. There is a story that Songtsen, after many previous attempts, commissioned a young man from the Tonmi clan to travel to India and study writing with a famous Brahmin. The teacher’s initial scepticism was overturned by the diligence of his student, so much so that he awarded the young man the nickname Sambhota: ‘the good Tibetan’. Whether or not it’s true, Songtsen’s commitment to literacy and its impact on Tibetan culture were both impressive and profound. Decades later a Chinese minister described Tibetans as ‘intelligent and sharp, and untiring in their love of study’. It was meant as a warning.

A few years after Songtsen’s death, the statue of Buddha that Wencheng

had brought from China was moved from its original temple to a new site, one that would eventually become the spiritual heart of Lhasa and by extension Tibet, known as the Jokhang, the ‘house of the statue’, and more commonly in Tibet as the Tsuglakhang. Walking round the temple today, following the devotional circuit known as the Barkhor, the sacred smell of juniper incense in the air, alongside hundreds of Tibetans, many counting off their mala, or prayer beads, a few spinning prayer wheels, the hum of mantras on their lips, is a humbling reminder of the many centuries of shared spiritual effort. Yet Buddhism had some way to go in the late seventh century before it became the spiritual practice of ordinary people, and not just foreign princesses and well-travelled nobles.

When Songtsen died, his grandson, the next tsenpo, was still a small

child. So his chief minister Gar became regent and proved no less capable in charge than he had serving Songtsen, using the invention of writing to get a firmer administrative grip on the empire and relying on his sons as military leaders. The Chinese emperor Taizong had died in the same year as Songtsen, and the Tang’s hold on the city-states of the Silk Road had weakened. The revenues and opportunities the Silk Road offered were impossible to resist. When the Tibetans came down from their high plateau to lay siege to Khotan, the city was as famous for its intellectual openness as it was for its devotion to Buddhism. None of that impressed Tibet’s warriors, in their leather scale armour, faces painted with red ochre; as far as the cosmopolitan people of Khotan was concerned, their sole motivation was money. They seemed determined to humiliate Buddhism, not adopt it. Khotan’s religious freedoms suffered miserably under the Tibetan army’s occupation.

Buddhism’s reputation within Tibet fluctuated after Gar’s regency ended

and the tsenpos reasserted their power. In 710, another Chinese princess, Jincheng, arrived in Lhasa to marry the young tsenpo Tride Tsugtsen, then only a boy and in the control of his mother, who ruled as proxy. Jincheng was a devout Buddhist and used her influence to support her faith; she was known as a temple-builder. The Tang had by now reasserted its control of the Silk Roads, and after a wave of anti-Buddhist purges, refugees began arriving in Lhasa seeking her protection. This she happily gave; as numbers swelled, so resentment rose among the indigenous population. When an epidemic broke out – probably smallpox – killing many Tibetans and the princess herself, it was easy to pin it on the foreign religion. The message was clear: don’t meddle with the old ways. Attitudes at court hardened; Buddhism was banned.

Like many new states experiencing rapid change, Tibet struggled to

balance notions of traditional identity with ideas from the wider world it now inhabited. Inevitably, factions arose. Those aristocrats that had built links with Buddhist institutions in China chafed at the reactionary tilt of the tsenpo and his ministers. The state itself was under pressure. A treaty of convenience with Arab forces in Central Asia had compensated for the loss of the Silk Roads to some extent, but Tibet needed trade to finance its security. Tride Tsugtsen grew old: his nickname was Me Agstom, or ‘bearded grandfather’. His death, however, was at the hands of hired assassins, in the year 755. At the end of that year, the brilliant Tang general An Lushan launched a rebellion against the emperor Xuanzong, a rebellion that ultimately failed but which weakened the Tang dynasty. For the next few years, the new tsenpo, Trisong Detsen, watched as the tide of Chinese power consumed itself and ebbed away. The Tang dynasty, which had promised to ‘swallow the peoples of the four directions’, stripped its best troops from recently established garrisons in north-east Tibet. The way was open for Trisong Detsen to send his troops back onto the Silk Roads.

When the city of Dunhuang fell, having held out against a Tibetan siege

for more than a decade, the Tang were forced to acknowledge it could no longer control its borders with Tibet. In 763, Tibetan troops briefly occupied the Tang capital Chang’an, and although they soon withdrew, their presence nearby was a constant threat. China made deals with the Uighurs in the north and the Arab Abbasid Caliphate to the west, relieving pressure on their borders and at some cost to the Tibetans. But the complex power structure in Central Asia had shifted for good. In the early 820s, China and Tibet signed a peace treaty recorded in a famous stele that still stands in front of the Jokhang. Despite modern Chinese propaganda, it was a treaty made between equals. It would be almost a thousand years before China was able to reassert control in Central Asia.

Tibet’s political fortunes soared under Trisong Detsen. The Old Tibetan

Chronicle records: ‘Externally, they expanded the kingdom in all four directions; internally, welfare was abundant and undiminished.’ Yet it is his religious leadership for which modern Tibetans so warmly remember him today. He is the second of the ‘dharma kings’, and comfortably the most important. While later Tibetan histories sometimes conflict with the Dunhuang manuscripts, to the advantage of the Buddhist establishment, there is much more accord when it comes to Trisong Detsen. The success of Tibetan Buddhism – and the reason why most people in the West know something of it, even while they have never heard of the Tibetan Empire – is rooted in Trisong Detsen’s determined patronage, though admittedly it was only achieved on the back of Tibet’s political success and access to international trade. It was an investment that paid off in unexpected ways. Although the Tibetan Empire would collapse four decades after Trisong Detsen’s death, his spiritual legacy has endured, against the odds, for far longer.

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Tibetan Buddhist historians wrote from the perspective of their religion being an inevitable spiritual destiny, but there was nothing certain about it. Before Trisong Detsen, Buddhism had been one of several competing options for the spiritual future of Tibet. The Tibetan elite was well aware of Islam. While seeking Arab support against their enemies in the early 700s, Tibet had requested an Islamic scholar be sent to instruct them on this new religion. A golden Buddha was sent to Mecca, although it was melted down for coins soon after. The Tibetans also knew about Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and its prophet Mani, and Chinese philosophies like Taoism and Confucianism. In the minds of their rivals the Chinese, meanwhile, they were barbarians, people who worshipped spirits in the earth and air and gods of war that needed placating: fearsome warriors but little else. Tang records describe them as mostly nomads, their way of life savage, covered in filth, never bathing or washing their hair.

As an ambitious man, and one exposed to the sophistication of Chinese

culture, Trisong Detsen set about adding some philosophical breadth and depth to Tibetan society. Whatever his personal spiritual beliefs, of which we know little, Buddhism was the obvious candidate: it was already present and acknowledged at court and as an institutional model it was the most completely understood. Islam and Christianity were too exotic, Taoism too Chinese, and Manichaeism, as far as Trisong Detsen was concerned, flat-out fraudulent. Buddhism was truly international. It had adherents among the nomad tribes of the north, in the hot flatlands on the south side of the mountains, and in the Tibetan Empire’s vassal state of Nepal, or Balpo as the Tibetans knew it. It was in Buddhism’s intellectual heartland of Kashmir as well as the Chinese imperial capital of Chang’an, and in the cities of the Silk Road. Tibet could either retreat into itself or go out and meet the world around it. Trisong Detsen chose the latter.

Before Trisong Detsen, the introduction of Buddhism had been

piecemeal, episodic and often inspired by foreigners like the Chinese princesses. This time, once the tsenpo committed, its spread was systematic, ambitious and farsighted. Foreigners, inevitably, still played a central role. The greatest teachers were from the Buddhist universities and monasteries in India, and among students of Zen in China. Yet their presence at court was problematic and created suspicion. A Tibetan nobleman called Selnang, from the Ba clan, was a key figure in recruiting foreign scholars. His role is described in the Testament of Ba, a document that describes the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet and the founding of Samye monastery, the first of the great monastic institutions that would direct Tibet’s story for the next thousand years. Fragments from an early version of this story were found in the Dunhuang Caves dating from the ninth or tenth century. They reveal a process that was fraught with tension.

Selnang travelled to Nepal and brought back an eminent scholar called

Santarakshita, abbot of Nalanda, the Buddhist monastery or mahavihara in what is now the Indian state of Bihar, a little south of Kathmandu. In later versions, the abbot is politely quizzed about the teachings of Buddha. In the earliest version he is imprisoned in the Jokhang until the Tibetan court can be reassured that Santarakshita wasn’t about to cast a spell over them. That done, plans for a great monastery, modelled on Nalanda’s neighbour Odantapuri, were laid, but a series of natural disasters reawakened local fears of foreign gods. Santarakshita was sent away and only recalled when nerves were calmed. This time he brought with him a tantric master. Padmasambhava was born in the Swat valley, west of the Indus, now part of Pakistan but then a Buddhist centre. The foundation myth of Samye monastery tells how Padmasambhava identified and then drove out the demons blocking the spread of the dharma. The story can be read as a metaphor, naming and disempowering the spirit enemies of Trisong’s progressive vision; it is also the foundation story for Tibet’s powerful Nechung Oracle, a protective spirit still consulted by the Dalai Lama. Padmasambhava was a fiery and unwelcome presence at court, and he was encouraged to leave once he’d worked his magic, yet in time he would become immensely popular, a folklore hero, known as Guru Rinpoche, the ‘precious teacher’.

The temple of Samye was designed in the shape of a mandala, literally a

circle, but meaning a geometric metaphysical diagram, reflecting the four cardinal points of the universe with Mount Meru at its centre, a design from the heart of Indian Vedic cosmography. The temple at the centre had three storeys, the first in Indian style, the second Chinese and the third modelled on the temples of Khotan, a statement of Tibet’s cosmopolitan intent. Samye still stands, and its original layout is preserved, although war, earthquake, fire and the destruction inflicted in the 1960s and ’70s under China’s rule during its Cultural Revolution have all taken their toll on the buildings. It became the foundation stone of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, the oldest of the four great schools, Nyingma meaning ‘old ones’, with Guru Rinpoche a founder of the tradition but its origins a fusion of Tibet’s indigenous religion and Buddhist philosophy.

Samye would be the location for one of the great dramas of Trisong’s

reign, an encounter between two competing visions of Buddha’s teaching. Just as he had brought Santarakshita, Selnang also brought Zen monks to Tibet. The two traditions clashed over how best to transcend the earthly cycle of suffering and achieve enlightenment. The Indian sutra tradition took a gradualist approach, conceptualising the path to nirvana in day-to-day practice, sutra meaning ‘discourse’. Zen promised a more dynamic, immediate route to non-being, regarding the step-by-step approach as pedantic, unworthy of a brilliant, incisive mind. Trisong decided the two sides should meet at Samye in debate. He called on Kamashila, a student of Santarakshita, to present the sutra approach. A monk called Moheyan offered the Zen perspective but Kamashila outfoxed him, won the argument and as a consequence Tibetan Buddhism became rooted in the Indian tradition, and Zen faded from view. Although some scholars doubt such a pivotal debate took place, the story reflects a broader struggle for ascendancy between the different schools of Tibet’s Buddhist missionaries.

When it came to Buddhist scriptures, however, there was no competition.

The thousands of sutras and their commentaries were to be found in monasteries and universities across the Himalaya in India. Trisong embarked on a hugely ambitious and wildly expensive process of bringing translators from India and Nepal to work with Tibetan scholars who had learned Sanskrit. Terms that simply didn’t exist in Tibetan had to be created; the language itself grew and morphed as it swallowed a religious culture whole. This work more than anything rooted Buddhism sufficiently well for it to survive the Tibetan Empire’s later collapse and the fall of its divine emperors. Trisong’s legacy lit a flame, turning Tibet into a spiritual beacon, a process instigated and funded by an empire that soon after disappeared from view. When that happened, the flame of Buddhism guttered but was not extinguished. It was nourished back to life not in Lhasa, the city of the gods, but in a now obscure corner of western Tibet, in the northern shadow of the Himalaya, by a long-forgotten empire whose last embers were the first glimpse any European had of the Tibetan world.

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