1 The Progresskt, Tibetan Party was originally formed in 1939, in Kalimpong, India, by Rabga Pangdatshang, Kunphel‐la and Changlochen, see below p. 90.Google Scholar

2 Eastern Tibet is divided up into two traditional provinces, Kham and Amdo, natives of each being known respectively as Khampa and Amdowa. Rabga Pangdatshang, who came from one of the most wealthy Khampa trading families, made a formal request to the Bengal government concerning the formation of his party (Kalimpong is in Bengal), as he apparently did not wish it to be a clandestine organization.

3 bKras‐mthong, Rakra Thub‐bstan Chos‐dar, dCe‐’dun Chos‐’phel gyi Lo‐rgyus, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, LTWA, Dharamsala, 1980, pp. 102–105:Google Scholar ‘Apho Rabga etc… had founded a party, called the Tibetan National Congress, or something like that… and had offered a programme of revolutionary reform, in harmony with the times, and in order to defend the government’. See also the very vague references to Rabga’s political activity in Radhu, A.W. Caravane Tibétaine, Paris, Fayard, 1981, pp. 171–72,Google Scholar and Dhondup, K. ‘Gedun Chompel, the Man Behind the Legend’, in Tibetan Review, 10 1978, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar Shakabpa, W.D. in Tibet. A Political History, Yale University Press, 1967,Google Scholar does not mention the existence of the party, neither in the English version, nor in the extended Tibetan version, Bod kyi Srid Don rGyal‐rabs. An Advanced Political History of Tibet, Delhi, 1976.

4 See Stoddard, Heather Le Mendiant de l’Amdo, see title note, p. 76.Google Scholar Melvyn Goldstein of Cleveland is preparing a very extensive political study of the period and Chie Nakane, of Tokyo, a study of the nobility in the first half of the twentieth century. Both publications are awaited as important contributions to our understanding of the internal political processes in Tibet during this period.

5 India Office Records, L/Political & Secret/12.4167. Coll. 36/4, Flag of Tibet, 1923.

6 See a photograph of the gunsmiths at the arsenal in Lhasa in the early 1920s, Bell, C. Tibet Past & Present, Oxford, 1924, opp. p. 192.Google Scholar

7 Agvan Dorjiev (1849–1938), see Le Mendiant de l’Amdo, op. cit., Ch. II. Described as a Russian spy by most Western writers, he played an important role in the little known pan‐Mongol movement of the early part of this century, and was a highly respected Tibetan Buddhist scholar, and close intimate of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.

8 See Ekai Kawaguchi, Three Years in Tibet, Bibliotheca Himalayica, Ratna Pustak Bhandar, Kathmandu 1979, pp. 375–82, for a graphic description of the punishment accorded to the conspirators. Also Shakapba, W.D. op. cit., p. 195, and Tokan Tada, The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Tokyo, Toyo Bunko, 1965, pp. 104–105.Google Scholar

9 Mehra, Parshotam Tibetan Polity. 1904–1937, Wiesbaden, Otto Harrassowitz, 1976, p. 14; T. Tada, op. cit. pp. 49–55.Google Scholar

10 See Bacot, Jacques Introduction à l’histoire du Tibet, Paris 1962, p. 112,Google Scholar for an account of the arrival of Zhao Erfen’s forces at Lhasa, and for a personal appreciation of the ‘Butcher’.

11 It was the British military expedition that had directly provoked Chinese retaliation in Kham and the creation of the project of assimilation of the Tibetan plateau. Younghusband, Sir Francis India and Tibet, London, 1910; Parshotam Mehra, The Younghusband Expedition, London, 1968, and Peter Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa, London, 1961.Google Scholar

12 Mehra, P. The North‐Eastern Frontier, Vol. II, 1914–1954, Delhi, 1980, pp. xxiii‐xxiv.Google Scholar

13 The Assembly, often called the National Assembly (in Tibetan: Tshogs‐’du), was formed in 1871, and consisted of the abbots of the three big monasteries of Drepung, Sera and Ganden, and the heads of all government departments. Shakabpa, W.D. op. cit., p. 190.Google Scholar See Rahul, Ram The Government and Politics of Tibet, Delhi, 1969, pp. 31–2,Google Scholar for a description of its functions. ‘The role of the Tsongdu was very important in the determination of all questions of policy.’

14 sDe‐pa gZhung: i.e. the Tibetan government.

15 Made public in 1932. See Shakabpa, W.D. cit. p. 270.Google Scholar

16 Pangdatshang, Rabga in the Tibetan newspaper, Melong, Kalimpong, 24 12 1936 .Google Scholar See translation in Le Mendian t de l’Amdo, op, cit, Ch. Ill.

17 Bell, C. Portrait of the Dalai Lama, London, 1946, p. 388,Google Scholar makes veiled allusions to this in his detailed account of the last days of the Dalai Lama. See Le Mendiant de l’Amdo, op. cit, Ch. Ill. A new Tibetan publication from Lhasa, Bod kyi rig gnas lo rgyus rgyu cha bdams bsgrigs, Lhasa, 1982, gives two slightly different versions of the last moments of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, one by Lha‐klu Tsche‐dbang rDo‐rje, on his father Lungshar, see pp. 100–1, and another by Brag‐gseb Thub‐bstan Chosrgyal, on the Dalai Lama’s doctor, see pp. 127–9, in which the state oracle is described as forcibly administering medicine that was far too strong.

18 See Who’s Who in Tibet, 1938, India Office Records, IOR L/P&S/20/D220, p. 44.

19 See Richardson, H.E. A Short History of Tibet, New York, 1962, pp. 139–41.Google Scholar Lungshar is condemned as a medieval conspirator.

20 In 1951, the Zhol prison was almost as empty as the Bastille at the time of the French Revolution. There had been a general amnesty on the occasion of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s enthronement. The prison was also enshrouded in a similar aura of torture and cruelty. See the Tibetan version of Lungshar’s end, by his son, Lha‐klu Tshe‐dbang rDo‐rje, op. cit., pp. 93–109, and Rakra, op. cit., pp. 111–14, who in contrast defends the conditions in the prison compared to others in Asia.

21 Cf. supra no. 16 and infra no. 27.

22 Gelugpa, one of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and politically the most powerful, with the Ddai Lama and the Panchen Lama as its foremost leaders.

23 SāTktyāTyan, RāThul Mērí jívan Ytrā (Autobiography), Vol. II, the month of 06 1934, Ilahabad, Kitab Mahal, 1950.Google Scholar

24 Although at this time China had very little, or no control at all, over many of the regions of the actual national minorities, that they were to claim as belonging to the PRC.

25 See Teichman, Eric Travels of a Consular Officer in Eastern Tibet, Cambridge University Press, 1922, p. 228 note.Google Scholar

26 Dreyer, June China’s Forty Millions, Harvard, 1976, pp. 63–4.Google Scholar

27 Richardson, H.E. A Cultural History of Tibet, Boulder, Colorado, 1980, p. 245.Google Scholar See the Tibetan newspaper, Melong, Kalimpong, 1 January 1951, for an article by Tharchin on Geshe Sherab Gyatsho.

28 See IOR L/P&S/12/240/Coll.36/39, 1 December 1944. There are doubts, however, as Rabga Pangdatshang also made a translation of the Three Principles of the People into Tibetan.

29 See the various editions of Who’s Who in Republican and Communist China, Shirob Jaltso (or Zhihai). See also the obituary (in Tibetan) in Shes‐bya, Dharamsala, June 1981, pp. 25–6. A paper entitled ‘The Long Life of Geshe Sherab Gyatsho’ was given, by the present author, at the Conference of the International Association of Tibetologists, at Munich, July 1985.

30 whitewashed, Abridged versions of Mein Kampf were circulating in India and South‐East Asia at the time. See Hitler’s Mein Kampf, introduction by D.C. Watt, translation by R. Manheim, London, 1969, pp. xv, xvii.Google Scholar

31 Tseng, Li Tieh Tibet. Today and Yesterday, New York, 1960, p. 61.Google Scholar

32 Takla, T.N. ‘Notes on some early Tibetan communists’ in Tibetan Review, 06‐07 1969, pp. 7–9, 19.Google Scholar

33 A Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism 1921–1965, Volume 2, Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 748.

34 See Takla, T.N. op. cit., p. 8.Google Scholar

35 India Office Records, L/P&S/12/4210 Coll. 36/39, 23 October 1943.

36 Oral information.

37 India Office Records, op. cit., 10 November 1943.

38 See his life story, which forms the second part of Le Mendiant de l’Amdo, op. cit.

39 Le Mendiant de l’Amdo, op. cit., Ch. III.

40 See Takla, T.N. op. cit., p. 9.Google Scholar

41 India Office Records L/P&S/12/4230 Coll. 36/53, Trade Mission. See also Shakabpa, W.D. op. cit., pp. 294–97.Google Scholar

42 Rakra, op. cit., p. 169,Google Scholar gives a sinister and romantic account of a meeting between Gedun Chompel and a communist party agitator in monk’s robes, in Lhasa, 1950.

43 Le Mendiant de l’Amdo, op. cit., Ch. III.

44 Nyingmapa, another of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, see note 22.

45 The earliest written Tibetan manuscripts that are known (8th—10th century). Two important collections are in the British Library and the Bibliothque Nationale, Paris.

46 Moukherjí, Phāní ‘Rāhuljí kē sāth Tibbat kā abhiyān mem’, in Sarasuatī (Hindi journal), 07 1964, 64.Google Scholar

47 In Tibetan grub‐thob or grub‐chen, considered as enlightened beings, beyond the entraves of the cycle of existence (saåa), and therefore of all norms of conventional behaviour.

48 He was in fact under ‘city arrest’, his movements being limited to the periphery of Lhasa.

49 For example, Rabga Pangdatshang, Abdul Wahid, Lachung Apho, Chichak, Rakra Rinpoche.

50 For example, Geshe Sherab, Horkhang Sonam Pelbar, Geshe ChÖdrak, Phuntshok Wangyal.