Book Review: A Narrative History Of The Real Tibet, Not The Tibet Of Our Imaginations

Where is Tibet?

That depends upon which Tibet you are talking about. Is it the Tibet that the Chinese occupiers refer to as the Tibet Autonomous Region? Is it the larger ethnographic Tibet that share the same language? Or is it the larger still Tibet of yore that overlaps with four Chinese provinces and four other Himalayan kingdoms?

And while we’re at it, was Tibet the spiritual paradise that Hollywood movies evoke before the Chinese liberation or occupation or whatever you believe it to be? Or was it a place of medieval suffering in which peasants were bound to overlords for life, as Beijing would like you to believe?

Sam Van Schaik, an English Tibetologist, does an admirable job of sorting out those questions in Tibet: A History, a newly published book that offers a fascinating narrative on the 1,400 year history of the kingdom at the top of the world. He notes that Tibetan history is replete with saintly traditions but it also was a violent and dangerous place, as well as a highly stratified society with an aristocratic minority and peasant and nomad majority. And of course the Dalai Lamas and priests living in the extraordinary latticework of monasteries and stupas.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Tibet: A History is that is has not been the isolated and unchanging place of our imagination, cut off from the rest of humanity by some of the world’s high mountains. In fact, Van Schaik writes, Tibet was deeply involved with other cultures throughout much of its history, underwent enormous political and religious changes, but did not coalesce into anything resembling a national identity until the 20th century.

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