Shangri-La History
What images of Tibet tell us about the Founding Fathers
Real Tibet
Back in 2000, Orville Schell released a brilliant book called Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood. In it, he discusses how the mystique of Tibet has had a profound impact on its historical trajectory.
Starting with early adventurer logs written by people like Henry Lansdell and William Rockhill, to later Hollywood productions like Brad Pitt’s rendition of Heinrich Harrer’s time with the Dalai Lama in Seven Years in Tibet, Schell identifies the many illusions about Tibet that emerged from these kinds of works and entered into the political discourse, and how those fantasies affected the now-decades-long independence movement.
What especially lends to the “virtual” view of Tibet is that an entire country and culture is personified in a single man, the 14th Dalai Lama. A modest, charismatic fellow always draped in the apparel of a monk, his distinctness from what Westerners know as ‘normal’ among leaders only strengthens the perception between the banality of Western culture and the esoteric spiritualism of Tibetan culture. Add to that his noticeable accent when speaking otherwise excellent English, along with his occasional social faux pas predicated on acute culturally accepted normative differences, and the image is complete.
Alas, the real Tibet is no more or less a Shangri-la than any other historical place, James Hilton’s depiction notwithstanding. As is the case of any people anywhere, Tibetan history is replete with violence, political intrigue, discrimination, sectarian division, and, well, all the other lousy stuff we recognize as the common threads of our historical fabric.
Even the Dalai Lama as an institution was not without its controversies. The first Dalai Lama to be named as such, Sonam Gyatso, received his title from the Mongol warlord Altan Khan, not from Tibetan oracles or officials. Gyatso technically became the Third Dalai Lama, as the previous two were identified posthumously and contemporaneously to his recognition. You can read more about those first three in a brief article I wrote, here.
The Fifth Dalai Lama, often referred to as “the Great Fifth,” managed his ascension to both political and religious power quite pragmatically, and did not spare the sword in some cases.
At the time of his rise, Tibet was embroiled in what could reasonably be called a civil war. To “reunify” Tibet, as Matthew Kapstein has put it, the Fifth seized land and wealth from certain Buddhist sects and handed them to the Gelukpa (the sect of the Dalai Lamas), he chartered the building of many new Geluk monasteries, some rather ostentatious, and he did not prevent the execution of lingering loyalists from the brutal monarchy that his government ultimately supplanted.
After he died, lower-level political figures frequently battled for primacy over the years. Their conflicts led to what almost certainly were assassinations of later Dalai Lamas, some even as children. Nobles occasionally fought and killed each other, sometimes with the help of Chinese officials posted by the Qing dynasty rulers in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.
In one case, these officials — known as the amban — orchestrated the assassination of the then-Tibetan king, Gyurmé Namgyel, in 1750, partly driven by his despotic rule. That killing led to a brief uprising where allies of the deceased king led squads that murdered both amban officials and many other Chinese living in the city.
Starting in the 1800s, Central Asia endured the Great Game, an ongoing geopolitical contest between the British and Russians that left Tibetans (and Afghanis, and many others) in the middle, often to disastrous consequences.
Later that century, conservatives in Tibetan politics feuded with the 13th Dalai Lama — the most adept of them since the Great Fifth — about how to handle the country’s defense, which some argue eventually made Tibet more vulnerable to outside encroachment and abuses.
As just this tiny bit of history is meant to show, no place is exempt from the darker tides of humanity’s story. (I have a book coming out about all this later this year, but for now you can read The Tibetans, by Matthew Kapstein, for a good primer).
So what in the world does this have to do with US politics?
The reimagination of this story of the Dalai Lamas and Tibet in some modern minds is reminiscent of the way Americans characterize the Founders.
To support whatever is the narrative of the moment, people tend to lionize figures and beliefs about the past while conveniently ignoring their associated flaws. Doing this diminishes the pursuit of solutions because it obfuscates real problems, replacing elements of them with facile substitutions that only serve to prop whichever side’s position.
The result of such sophistry is that debates degrade into mere power struggles, with the most aggressive or strongest faction nearly always winning, and humanity losing. There’s no presentation of evidence or evaluation of the quality of ideas, just a fictive competition with the louder or more animated storyteller winning.
Regarding the Tibetan dispute with China, might things have developed differently if Tibetans were characterized as real people, replete with societal blemishes, instead of fictional characters of whimsical fairy tales, when political autonomy was on the line? Perhaps.
An often asserted position in the arguments about Tibet’s status as an independent polity was that features of its “mystical” nature illustrated its historical function as a mere protectorate of the Qing dynasty, thus a part of the modern-day Chinese polity. (Then again, when convenient, the opposite of the Shangri-La narrative was used to highlight the supposed feudal and oppressive character of pre-20th century Tibetan government to make the same point).
A careful analysis of the documented history, however, reveals a very muddled tale, one that provides little conclusive evidence one way or the other as to whether Tibet was always or ever wholly independent.
(I would add that centuries of history themselves should not determine the validity of one government’s demands over another people’s right to self-determination in the present, but that’s an argument for another day).
In America, the asserted ruminations of the Founders — however fanciful or selective — often become the foundation for judicial opinions that effectively become law. We even have a name for it — originalism.
If one considers the rampant deficiencies of character among many of these revered individuals, then the question about the legitimacy of originalism’s role in jurisprudence becomes a poignant one. Let’s face it, some of the designers of the Constitution were slaveowners, for example. Is their opinion on the station of certain people in society one that should carry any relevance in 2024?
The MAGA movement itself presupposes an apparition of the United States as something to ‘return to’ without really defining what or when that was. Indeed, the ideology requires ambiguity because no such phantasm ever existed or could be fairly described. What is really proffered is a fragmented fiction that must be completed in the mind of each adherent.
And this, as we have seen, is quite powerful.
Just as many virulent activists of Tibetan independence strive to protect a mental construct of a place and people that lived a very different, but nonetheless real, experience, so too do certain modern political activists in the United States.
The raw emotional attachment to the abstraction carries far greater weight than the nuanced, complex, and ugly reality. As long we persist in battling over dreamscapes that none of us can ever truly share, the extant problems in need of solving will simply linger and amplify.
I am not sure what the solution is in this moment, but in the long term the answer is easy — education. Enough with teaching whitewashed, oversimplified history. Children are not fools; they can handle carefully ascending intellectual gradations starting at a very young age. If anything, it is our societal obligation to teach that way.
True patriotism requires facing the gloom of the past to brighten the future. Pretending that children lack perspicacity, as we currently do, results in adults that many of us feel the temptation to call ignorant because they harbor viewpoints that better educated folks readily identify as unsupported nonsense. But whatever we may think of them and the views they hold, they still vote, and deservedly so.
Robert Vanwey was Senior Technical Analyst for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice, who specialized in investigating public corruption, and technology and financial crime. He also has a Juris Doctor and Master degree in history.
Today he teaches Tibetan history and topics related to the environment in the Himalayas at the Dharma Farm. Classes are offered online, and about once per week the Dharma Farm provides an open-to-the-public online forum on all different things related to Tibet, Buddhism, and the Himalayas. These forums often include guest speakers of various disciplines. Visit the website here, or Facebook here, for more details.
If you like Rob’s work, check out the Evidence Files Substack for an exploration into technology, science, aviation, and the Himalayas, where he frequently lives and works.
