"Never has empty space been so full"

March 2, 2017 11:06 PM

Guge rose to prominence in the tenth century following the collapse of the early Tibetan empire ruled from central Tibet. Tibetans speak of a “second diffusion” (chidar) of Buddhism to the high mountain plateaus under the patronage of the Guge kings, who developed a distinctive form of political organization: one of the royal princes would assume what might be called secular power, while his brothers and nephews would take monastic vows; among them, one became abbot of the Tholing monastery and thus emerged as the religious leader of the entire Guge region. Our modern categories should not, however, mislead us.

David Shulman reviews "Peter van Ham’s astonishing new book, Guge: Ages of Gold."

let's flip a few pages!

In Guge, as later in Tibet as a whole, the monastic-intellectual aristocracy retained immense political and economic power. There were also times when king and abbot vied for control of the rich resources of this Silk-Road kingdom; such rivalry may have played a part in the arrival in Guge in 1630 of an army from Ladakh that, after a brutal siege, demolished the capital of Tsaparang and killed the last of the great Guge kings—the beginning of the end for the kingdom. This episode is the subject of a visually powerful but highly romanticized film released in 2006 by Discovery Networks and France 5—Guge, The Lost Kingdom of Tibet—largely in the Shangri-La genre, but with excellent commentary by archaeologists John Bellezza and Tsering Gyalpo.

Bellezza has much more about Guge

Tony Wheeler, Tholing and Tsaparang, Tibet

It continues to amaze me that despite all the documentaries, guidebooks and other enticements it's still possible to stumble across a place where the only honest reaction is, "Why haven't I heard of this before?" Like the Guge Kingdom in Western Tibet.

A Note On Tholing Monastery[PDF]

Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way Of The White Clouds, Ch. 49

The frescoes were of the highest quality we had ever seen in or outside Tibet. They covered the walls from the dado (about two and three-quarter feet from the floor) right up to the high ceiling. They were lavishly encrusted with gold and minutely executed, even in the darkest corners or high up beyond the normal reach of human sight, and even behind the big statues. In spite of the minute execution of details, some of the fresco-figures were of gigantic size. Between them middle-sized and smaller ones would fill the space, while some places were covered with miniatures not bigger than a thumb-nail and yet containing figures, complete in every detail, though only discernible through a magnifying glass, it soon became clear to us that these paintings were done as an act of devotion, irrespective of whether they would be seen or not; they were more than merely decorations: they were prayers and meditations in line and colour.

Sadly, It was only this year that I have come to fathom the degree of looting that has taken place in Guge, one of Upper Tibet’s premier cultural regions. Looting in recent years has been widespread and highly systematic, the result of a collaborative effort that seems to reach far and wide. Earlier, according to information received, I thought this looting was carried out by isolated criminal gangs. However, this is only part of the picture, or so it seems.

posted by the man of twists and turns (9 comments total)

Too many links, I don't know where to go. Where is the meat where is the lede? Interested but frustrated.
posted by unliteral at 5:01 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Start here
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:29 AM on March 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

A good, if overwhelming post; thanks for the suggestion of a starting place (even that is a little overwhelming!). I don't have time to delve further at the moment, so I'll just gripe about the problem of the spelling of Tibetan names; from the NYRB article:

this region (known as Nari Khorsum in Tibetan)

Google suggests that "Nari Khorsum" is a 19th-century term, presumably long obsolete; the modern term (though I don't know if it covers the same territory) is Ngari Prefecture. But "Ngari" represents what is spelled in Tibetan as mnga' ris, and Beckwith (for example) refers to it as "modern Mngáris Province." Books that use a scientific transliteration, like the excellent Cultural History of Tibet, are full of terms like Sangs-rgyas and rkang-mgyogs which are 1) unpronounceable, and 2) impossible to correlate with the corresponding terms in books that use a more user-friendly transcription. What's a poor English-speaker to do? (Of course, it's much easier now with the magic of the internet, but it's still annoying.)
posted by languagehat at 9:17 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I for one appreciate a post "crammed with" links "in familiar yet always somehow divergent, innovative sequences that at first overwhelm the visitor’s eyes and baffle the mind through sheer profusion", to paraphrase an article in the NYRB I just read. Excellent post.
posted by jrb223 at 10:51 AM on March 3, 2017

This is a great and fascinating post! Thanks!
posted by homunculus at 11:15 AM on March 3, 2017

Do you suppose, "Sangs-rgyas" is the forerunner of Shangri La?
posted by Oyéah at 3:54 PM on March 3, 2017

The paintings are incredible, I especially like the Maitreya. Goodness.
posted by Oyéah at 4:20 PM on March 3, 2017

Oh, and this. I have returned again and again to this and the image of Maitreya. What a sumptuous mural, absolutely breathtaking. But, look again at this name, and the middle portion of it. Vairocanâbhisaṃbodhi Sutra. Something, something, about Sanskrit being the mother of our language.
posted by Oyéah at 1:12 PM on March 4, 2017

I've wondered since I heard of the Tibetan Empire how they produced the manpower to conquer anyone -- literally how they had the net primary productivity to raise enough people. This is a ludicrously simple view of the problem, but the plateau is crogglingly harsh: it doesn't produce much biomass and it's hard to cross. The Long March marchers thought it was hard travelling. Quite a lot of the known polyandrous societies are in that region and polyandry is explicitly described as a way not to over-populate agricultural/pastoral capacity. "Songtsän Gampo proved adept at diplomacy as well as combat.", but he's also described as having large armies. If they were mostly armies he had just recently conquered, that sure is some diplomacy.

The abandoned agricultural infrastructure Belleza describes is fascinating. It grew crops once and hasn't for centuries --- in the pictures it doesn't seem to be growing anything. There's not a scurf of dead grass on the fine-soil plateau. There's quite a lot on Tibetan climate change, but I haven't found anything in the Empire period; it cooled off in 0BCE or maybe 2000BCE, and agriculture switched from millets to barley. There's a small global cooling at the right period, maybe it made the high valleys usefully wetter for... a few hundred years? Less?

This is a very sublunar concern, but the trade and art are even more astounding someplace it's so hard to live.
posted by clew at 1:45 AM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]