The Snow Lion and the Dragon:
Tibet-China Relations
continues....

Tibet has a distinct and recognizable culture of its own, quite distinct from the Chinese. It has its own language, and its own form of Buddhism, and thus the Tibetans undoubtedly form a ‘nation’ of people, located on their own geographically distinct space. Various
Chinese empires at different times in history have, however, considered Tibet and the neighbouring Turki-inhabited areas to its northwest as part of the Chinese ‘sphere of influence’, or as ‘vassal states’, which is not the same as ruling them. The Han Chinese always, however, considered these peripheral peoples as ‘barbarians’, and this low opinion of them extended to the names actually used for them. For example, the Muslim Uighurs and Kazakhs of Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), as well as all Muslims of north-western China are generally known to the Han Chinese a‘Hui’ (pronounced hway), which is written using a Chinese character of the same name. One of the constituent radicals of this character is the one for ‘dog’ and as far as the Han rulers were concerned these barbarians were no better than dogs. Tibetans continued to be described by the Chinese in 1950 and 1951 by the epithet shi tsang, which simply meant ‘barbarians’.

Historically there have been times when non-Tibetan armies have entered central Tibet or Tibet’s frontier regions, though they were non Han Mongol or Manchu armies when the Manchus (the Qing Dynasty) were rulers of China. There have been times earlier when the Chinese empire was weak and the Tibetans strong and expansionist. It was during this period that the Tibetans had crossed the Himalayas and debouched onto the plains of eastern Hindustan and invaded Kanauj,
as discussed in the previous chapter. This was the case in the Seventh Century CE, when Tibet became an empire stretching from the borders of modern Uzbekistan in the west to central China in the east, from Xinjiang in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south. This was an
area stretching 2,250 km from east to west and 1,750 km from north to south, larger than the Han heartland of China.

To be continued......