History With Chinese Characteristics
In a former entry I commented on the poly-layered farce of the popular Chinese myth that the ancient Tang Empire made Tibet part of China thanks to Princess Wencheng "civilizing" the Tibetan "savages." I also commented that this myth has so many holes in it that even the Chinese (normally not shy about rewriting history) are abandoning it faster than peasants fleeing a Wuhan wet market after a quarantine announcement.
Instead, their official line is that Genghis Khan conquered Tibet and incorporated it into "China's Yuan Dynasty," and that Tibet has been under Chinese administration ever since.
If you have ever attended a history class in your life you can see that the first flaw in this statement is the notion that Genghis Khan was Chinese, and that his conquests were for China. And for the record, yes. The Chinese do actually claim that (Baker; Cao & Sun 133 & 136). China's official line is that the Mongol Horde of the Genghizid Khans was "an ethnic minority living in northern China."
Yeah, and the Mayans were an "ethnic minority living in the Southern United States."
The Mongols lived north of the Great Wall, which was China's northern border, and there was deep, deep enmity between the Mongols and the Chinese (more on that later). Yet the Chinese insist the Mongol conquest of China was not a "conquest" but a "unification." This, in turn, means that they claim Genghis Khan was Chinese and thus, so was the entire Mongol Empire, according to China's bastardized history. And of course, in classic Chinese fashion, they are busy trying to meddle in foreign academic circles to spread this lie to the world (Agence France-Press). By that surreal logic, India should claim sovereignty over Australia and Canada, since both of those were part of the British Empire.
Of course, come to think of it, so was Hong Kong.
Hmmm... Hey, Modi, are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Anyway, in this article, I will examine the two facts that skewer the Chinese government's rubbish about claiming Tibet based on the Yuan Dynasty. First, that the Yuan Dynasty was about as Chinese as I am, and second, that the Tibetans were FAR higher on the Mongolian Empire's pecking order (Peking order?) than the Chinese were.
This Isn't a Parallel Universe; It's a Perpendicular One!
Imagine this. You're an international education advisor. You are in Mexico City, visiting a local school, and you happen to observe a history class. In this class, you hear the teacher giving a lecture on 'the Great Aztec Emperor Hernando Cortez.' Maybe it's been a while since your own history classes but you're pretty sure that's not quite how it happened.
But Spanish is not your primary language, so you listen a little more closely, thinking perhaps you did not hear correctly. As you do, you hear the teacher going on to say how Spain is an 'ancient and inalienable part of Mexico.' "Hernando Cortez, Emperor of Tenochtitlan and one of Mexico's greatest national heroes," the teacher fawns, "united the Empire by bringing Spain under Mexican rule, later setting the stage for most of South America and the Philippines to be united with Mexico. He was a great Hero of the Motherland!"
If you can imagine how ridiculous this would sound, then you have an absolutely perfect frame of reference for just how moronic China's claims of sovereignty over Tibet -which are based on the fact that both Tibet and China were conquered by Mongolia- truly are.
In the early 13th century, the land that is today called "China" consisted of about 10 countries (none of which were called "China"), but the three most powerful were Jin (in the north), Song (in the south) and Tibet (in the West) (Khey Pard). Two of these three -Jin and Song- were populated by Han, the ethnic group commonly referred to as "ethnic Chinese," though the ruling oligarchy of Jin was Jurchen, an ethnic group whose descendants would be the Manchu and whose cousins were the Goguryeans (proto-Koreans). The Mongolian Army, led by Genghis Khan, swept out of the northern steppe and conquered Jin with ease. By 1234, Jin was a province of Mongolia. This fact (namely, that Song lasted longer than Jin) is why most Chinese historians refer to Song, rather than Jin, as the "Chinese Dynasty" of the era. The truth is neither of them was any more "Chinese" than Julius Caesar was "Italian" or Nebuchadnezzar II was "Iraqi," and the nation we call "China" today never existed prior to 1911 (Laird, 215), but I digress. For now, simply say present-day historians use the term "China" to refer to the borders of both Jin and Song during this time period.
It would be Genghis Khan's Grandson, Kubilai, who expanded the empire to include the nations of Tibet and Song, and it's interesting to note the difference in his approach to these two nations, but we'll get into that later. For now, I'll simply point out that Tibet became part of the Mongolian Empire in 1265, when Kubilai Khan's religious teacher (a Tibetan expat named Phagspa Gyaltsen, more on that later) returned to Tibet after years in the Mongol court with Kubilai Khan's offer: let Mongols rule the physical realm, and Tibetans rule the spiritual one (Laird, 112). Kubilai's conquest of Song took place years later, in 1279. By the time Kubilai conquered Song, he had adopted the Han tradition of choosing a single Chinese character, in this case Yuan (元), meaning "origin of the universe," as the name for his empire. This is odd considering he hated the Chinese and refused to even learn their language (Laird, 116), but it was deemed useful, in the same way using tribal titles was useful to the Spanish Conquistadors. It is this, the decision to adopt a Chinese name for his Dynasty, that Chinese "scholars" point to in their attempts to claim Kubilai's empire was Chinese and that he "unified the whole country," (Cao & Sun) rather than admitting he conquered China and China ceased to exist as a nation for the next several centuries (if it can even be said to have existed before, considering how divided it was).
Now note this.
Kubilai's proclamation of the "Yuan Dynasty" was in 1271. His conquest of Song was in 1279. But Tibet's annexation by Mongolia was in 1265.
In other words, Yuan didn't annex Tibet. Mongolia did. At the time of Tibet's annexation, Yuan didn't exist and there was nothing "Chinese" about Kubilai's empire except the language spoken by the farmers who formed its slave labor caste.
In the words of Thomas Laird, "the Mongols were not unifying what is now modern China; they were simply conquering or subjugating as many of their neighbors as they could. The Mongols' administration of Tibet was not linked to their administration of China, and in no way unified the two countries into a Chinese state (p. 120)."
Hearkening back to my previous example, the Spanish conquered Mexico, and the Spanish conquered the Philippines. I've never met a Filipino who thinks his country and Mexico are one, nor vice-versa. The Mongols built an empire, and two of the many nations in that empire were the Nation of Tibet, and the Nation of China.
And of the two, the Nation of Tibet held far higher status.
"Heaven Speakers" and Vermin
Before adopting the name "Central Nation" in 1911 as a manifestation of their ethnocentrism, the Han People's sole, solitary claim to national identity was that they were farmers, and their neighbors weren't. China's words for "civilization" and "barbarism" are based off of the principle "farmers = us = civilized; nomads = everyone else = animals."
As agricultural society began to acquire a distinct cultural identity and to assume a more definite political organization, it began to conceive of itself as different from pre-agricultural society. According to one estimate, the Chinese began to think of themselves as "Chinese" (Hua 华) from about the mid-second millennium... those excluded, predominantly by cultural criteria, were regarded as "barbarians." (Smith, Tibetan Nation, 20)
The primary difference between the Chinese and the barbarians [in the eyes of early Han people] was Chinese culture's practice of sedentary agriculture. The Chinese regarded the pre-agricultural peoples as sub-human, or as not yet human because they pursued a lifestyle similar to wandering beasts. (ibid, 21)
This character, Hua (华), has several meanings. It refers to something flowering or growing, like a cultivated plant. It would later take on connotations of being "magnificent" or "flourishing," fueling China's inherent and incurable ethnonarcissism, but in its earliest form it simply meant "those who know how to grow things." To the Han, this was the difference not only between civilized and uncivilized, but between Human and non-Human. And at the risk of beating a dead horse, this distinction formed the backbone of the superiority complex that forms the core of the only national identity the self-anointed "Central Nation" has ever had, even today.
Naturally, this arrogance did nothing to endear them to their nomadic Mongol conquerors, who already considered farmers to be the lowest caste of Human society. "Why dig in the dirt to make food grow when you can steal it from someone else? Fields are for horses, not people." In their sight, farmers turned valuable pastureland into useless paddies where horses couldn't graze (Laird, 122). Indeed, the Mongols had centuries of good reasons to hate their Han neighbors.
Since the Eastern Han dynasty, the northern and northwest ethnic groups (1) like Hun (2), Xianbei, Jie, Di and Qiang (3) had been forced to move into the hinterland and become tenant peasants, soldiers or even servants (4). (Cao & Sun, 83)
The Great Wall, for another example, was built not to "protect" China from raids, but for the explicit purpose of denying the Xiongnu (Mongol ancestors) access to their traditional winter pastureland (Smith, 29), thus dooming thousands of them to starvation and forcing most of them to move West, where their descendants became the Huns.
The nomads who remained behind, and nursed a well-earned grudge against the ethnonarcissistic lotus-eaters to their south, became the Mongols. They were not shy about their belief that the Han (Chinese) were the least trustworthy of their subjects (Johnson), and their solution to what they considered the "Han infestation" was the same solution the Japanese Empire thought of later on in the 1930's: genocide.
The Mongols sacked, looted and pillaged their way from one Chinese city to the next. They converted large swaths of fertile fields to pasture, and exterminated millions of farmers in north China, in lands just south of the Great Wall. Once the Mongols depopulated north China, their garrison troops brought in Chinese slaves to farm the land allotted to them by the emperor. (Laird, 121)
So, am I beginning to make my point that the Mongols were not out to "unite" China but rather to exterminate its population? Even Chinese state-owned tabloid Global Times wasn't able to avoid that glaringly obvious fact (Xu). Now then, contrast this with the Mongols' treatment of the nation next door to China: Tibet.
Yuan-a Try This Again, With Actual Facts?
A short few years ago, most people would have been shocked to hear anyone say "the Mongolian Empire was religiously tolerant." Somehow, in our minds, the words "tolerant" and "Genghis Khan" just don't belong together. It's true though, and thanks to the internet's affinity for picking the most shocking facts and making them the most-often-repeated, almost anyone with a search engine knows it (Cartwright, Atwood, and numerous others).
The Mongols had a word for priests, monks, bishops, shamans, imams, and basically all religious leaders: Teb-Tenggeri, meaning "people who can talk with Heaven" (Chang, J.Y., p. 31). And they held ALL Teb-Tenggeri in high esteem, granting them exemption from taxes and partial judicial immunity, for a variety of reasons, some of which were more noble than others (Smith, p. 94). But none of the religions they encountered in their conquest of most of the globe impressed them quite the way Tibetan Buddhism did. When the Mongols first rode into Tibet for their customary first contact mission (that is, to burn a few cities, slaughter the inhabitants, and give the rest of the population a chance to voluntarily submit and avoid having this fate visited upon the rest of the country, an invitation the Han foolishly declined), one monastery, Brigung, was obscured by a fog that prevented the Mongols from attacking it. The Mongol commander was so overawed at this, which he felt certain was caused by the monks, that he "invited" their Lama to return with him to the Khan's court.
Now, of course, this invitation began courteously and ended with a wolfish smile and "please, I insist." We're talking about a nation whose entire culture for that century and several afterward was built on "all the Earth surrenders or dies" after all. The Brigung Lama's answer was "why settle for me when you can have my teacher, Sakya Pandita?" (Smith, 83)
Ergo, Sakya and his nephew, the above-mentioned Phagspa, set out for the court of the Great Khan, that same palace of luxury and splendor that Marco Polo wrote about. Along the way though, he stopped to do something that would become an unparalleled historical irony, in light of 19th and 20th century events: he, a Tibetan Lama, generously saved a hive of Chinese from extermination at the hands of their Mongol superiors. When Sakya Pandita passed through Lanzhou in 1247, the Mongol Prince, Godan, was busy fulfilling a lifelong fantasy of every TEFL teacher who has ever suffered the horror of living and working in China: he was slaughtering the local Chinese population by throwing them into a river by the thousands.
Ah, such a blissful thought...
Anyway, Sakya Pandita, being a Holy man, persuaded Godan to stop this (Smith, 112).
...If Sakya had known what the descendants of those Chinese he saved would do to Tibet between 500 and 700 years later (Moynihan), I think he'd have reconsidered, as would Godan if he'd known what those same pests were going to later do to Mongolia (Graceffo). But then again, if America had known what a monster Mao was going to become, we wouldn't have saved China's helpless, pathetic little ass so many times in the past 160 years either, so I suppose being saved by undeserved mercy of more cultured and refined nations than China is kind of a recurring theme in Chinese history.
In any case, it was at the Mongol court that an extraordinary thing happened. Kubilai asked Phagspa to make Kubilai, Khan of all the Mongols in the world, his disciple. Phagspa told him, "if I'm to be your teacher, then just as I bow to you when I come to your throne, you must bow to me when you come to be taught."
And Kubilai Khan, ruler of the largest empire the world had ever seen at the time (and still the largest contiguous one to this day), self-proclaimed sovereign of the whole Earth, agreed to this (Smith, 88)! He bowed before a Tibetan Lama, acknowledging the Lama (at least in spiritual matters) as his superior.
This proves two things. First of all, it proves the Yuan Empire was not by any definition Chinese, because Chinese sources, written by the Party, for the Party, on the Party's orders and published by Party-owned publishing firms flatly attest that no Chinese emperor would ever have done this.
In Chinese traditional culture, the emperors have a higher authority than the gods. (Shi Zhongwen & Chen Qiaosheng, China's Culture p. 9)
China was never a religious nation, but a secular society where the worldly imperial authority surmounted religious authority. (ibid, 57)
Secondly, it establishes the esteem the Mongols had for Tibet. Kubilai Khan held the two monks in such high regard that he sent Phagspa back to Tibet, with an offer to incorporate them into the Mongol Empire as an elite religious aristocracy (Laird, 120). Smith cites a letter from Sakya Pandita from the Court of the Great Khan of All Mongols (Kubilai), which includes these lines:
The Great Patron [Kubilai Khan] was much pleased with me, whom he had invited. I had thought that aP'ags pa [Phagspa] who had taken with him his so small brother and retinue, would be enough. But he said to me: "among my subjects, I consider you as the head, the others the feet. You have been called by me, the others will come through fear... I, protecting [the world] with the law of men, you protecting it with the law of the gods, will the Buddha's teachings not spread over all the world as far as the ocean which is the earth's external boundary?" (p. 84)
This was an admittedly crude and early description of what later became the Cho-Yon relationship, whereby the Tibetans and Mongols essentially divided rule of "the world (read 'the Mongol Empire')." The physical realm was rule by Mongols. The Spiritual, by Tibetans. These terms placed the Mongols and Tibetans on almost equal footing, establishing that the Lama (a uniquely Tibetan role) was to religion what the Khan was to worldly power (Laird, 114). Meanwhile Sakya remained behind as his teacher (and yes, Kubilai would continue for the rest of his life to bow reverently before Sakya every time they met as teacher and student, though not when they met as emperor and subject).
Oh, and Kubilai agreed not to make any decision regarding Tibet without first consulting Phagspa (Laird, 119). Needless to say, he gave neither Jin nor Song (the two Han Ethno-states making up the land which was at other times called "China") any such courtesy. Indeed, the Forbidden City in Beijing was built on Kubilai's orders for the express purpose of creating a "no-Chinese zone" so he wouldn't have to deal with the perpetually puerile nonsense of the filthiest slave caste of his empire, the Chinese (Laird, 116). In fact, there was one other thing Kubilai did to drive home the point that the Nation of Tibet was above either of the Chinese nations he conquered. He made Phagspa the National Preceptor of the Mongolian Empire (Smith, 89), and began assigning the Tibetan Lamas (the new religious aristocracy of the Mongol Empire) the task of civilizing his Chinese slave horde through Buddhist teachings, much to the resentment of the latter (Smith, 97).
In short, the Tibetans and Chinese both were part of a foreign empire: that of the Mongols. Far from China's surreal version of the story though, this was not the incorporation of Tibet into China. If anything, the Mongols placed China under the feet of Tibet.
(1) A geographic descriptor followed by the term "ethnic groups" is China's euphemism for "nations that were not part of China but are now occupied by the PRC, though we daren't admit that because our official dogma claims we've never invaded anyone."
(2) Contrary to what the movie Mulan says, the "Huns" never went anywhere near China. A nation called the Xiongnu, who lived in roughly present-day Western Mongolia and Eastern Xinjiang, are generally believed to have migrated Westward and become the Huns later. Those few of them who stayed behind mixed with the Xianbei to become the Mongols.
(3) The Qiang, who were subject to constant nearly-genocidal assaults by the neverending succession of Han imperialist nations regarded by present historians as "Chinese Dynasties," were the ancestors of the modern-day Tibetans
(4) I have already commented on the way the book cited here as a source, the Chinese-Government-Approved China's History, by Cao Dawei and Sun Yanjing, bends over backward to avoid ever using the word "slaves" in reference to anyone in China, as part of the author's desperate attempt to say slavery never existed in China, which is bullshit on top of bullshit.
Works Cited
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Atwood, Christopher P. "Validation by Holiness or Sovereignty: Religious Toleration as Political Theology in the Mongol World Empire of the Thirteenth Century." Taylor & Francis LTD. The International History Review Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 237-256 (20 pages). Web. 31 Mar, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40109471?seq=1
Baker, Graeme. "Outrage as China Lays Claim to Genghis Khan." The Telegraph. 30 Dec, 2006. Web. 16 Mar, 2021. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1538174/Outrage-as-China-lays-claim-to-Genghis-Khan.html
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ISBN 978-7-5085-1302-7
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Chang, Jiunn Yih. A Study of the Relationship Between the Mongol Yuan Dynasty and the Tibetan Sa-skya Sect. Ph.D. diss. Indiana University, 1984
Graceffo, Antonio. "China’s Crackdown on Mongolian Culture". The Diplomat. 4 Sep, 2020. Web. 1 Apr. 2020. https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/chinas-crackdown-on-mongolian-culture/
Johnson, Jean. "The Mongol Dynasty - When Kubilai Khan Ruled China." Asiasociety.org. Web. 28 March, 2021. https://asiasociety.org/education/mongol-dynasty
Khey Pard. "The History of China: Every Year." Youtube. 8 Oct, 2017. Web. 27 Mar, 2021. 
Laird, Thomas. The Story of Tibet - Conversations With the Dalia Lama. New York, 2006. Grove Press.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4327-3
Moynihan, Maura. "Genocide in Tibet." The Washington Post. 25 January, 1998. Web. 1 April, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1998/01/25/genocide-in-tibet/27c0891c-57f1-4a7c-b873-a1071d93cbfd/
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