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  Stein paid Wang Yuanglu to let him take away ‘over thirty compact bundles of scrolls’ and various other miscellaneous bundles. The books he left, guessing they were reiterations of just one or two sutras, or scriptures. The following year the French scholar Paul Pelliot arrived at Dunhuang to pick over what Stein had left. Pelliot could read classical Chinese and other Central Asian languages and was thus able to make a fast and detailed assessment of what remained. (He was also a student of the Sanskrit scholar Sylvain Lévi, a crucial figure in Himalayan antiquity.) Even then the treasures of the Library Cave weren’t exhausted. Japanese travellers bought more in 1911 and Aurel Stein returned in 1914 to buy what Wang Yuanglu promised was the last of the treasures. Stein suspected the monk was lying and he was right: a few months later the Russian archaeologist Sergei Oldenburg bought a large number of Chinese and Tibetan scrolls, now in St Petersburg. Oldenburg, whose friendship with Lenin’s brother protected him after the Russian Revolution, founded an authoritative index of Buddhist texts that continues today. There was still a mass of documents left behind, many in Tibetan, and the great majority of these are now in Dunhuang Museum, rivalling the British and French collections in terms of size; these and other collections are now coordinated through the International Dunhuang Project.

  Buddhist texts of comparable importance were discovered at other sites, but Dunhuang was among the most important discoveries of ancient texts anywhere in the world. They transformed our understanding of Asian religions. Most of the fifty thousand manuscripts are in Chinese, but other languages are present, including Tibetan, Uighur, Sanskrit and Khotanese, the latter hardly known until the Library Cave’s discovery. Most of the material is Buddhist, and includes canonical works, like the famous Diamond Sutra from 868, the earliest printed book for which we have a date, now in the British Library. The Diamond Sutra is part of the Prajnaparamita, a Sanskrit term meaning ‘perfection of wisdom’. Its Sanskrit title is Vajracchedika, which literally means ‘diamond cutter’ or ‘thunderbolt cutter’, a metaphor for its value as a tool in reaching central truths within Buddhist philosophy: the self as illusion and liberation from attachment. The Dunhuang texts aren’t confined to Buddhism, however. There is a manual for the ancient game of Go, musical scores, works on mathematics and astronomy, texts from other religions, including Christianity (the so-called Jesus Sutras), and Manichaeanism, treatises on medicine and Chinese pharmacology, as well as texts on Tibet’s history.

  The Dunhuang documents also include material on the esoteric tantric Buddhism so popular in Tibet towards the end of the first millennium, material until recently overlooked in comparison to other treasures from the Library Cave. Tantric Buddhism, Vajrayana in Sanskrit, emerged in northern India in the early medieval period, practised by mahasiddha, ‘great adepts’, spiritual practitioners who pioneered a faster route to enlightenment by quitting their monasteries and sacred vows to live in caves and forests, like Hindu sannyasi, or renunciates, but also behaving in ways anathema to the philosophical elites they left behind, having sex, drinking alcohol and eating meat. Only by experiencing the actuality of ordinary life could its emptiness be properly understood. The Tibetan Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has described these adepts as ‘psychonauts’, explorers of the furthest reaches not of the world but of the mind.

  The Western imagination is transfixed with the sexual aspects of tantric practice, but while it’s there, it is only a fragment from a much wider system of teaching. The eleventh century Bengali mahasiddha Tilopa, having been thrown out of his monastery, made his money grinding sesame seeds for their oil – til is Sanskrit for oil – and worked as a bouncer and procurer for a prostitute. Later, however, Tilopa became an itinerant and highly admired teacher, whose students included Naropa, among the founders of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, an umbrella term covering a range of tantric teachings. As characters, mahasiddha were wildly romantic, growing their hair long and abandoning the distant austerity of more conventional practitioners. They rose to prominence during the Pala dynasty, the last Buddhist empire to rule a large part of India, but they also shared with Hindu Shaivites (followers of Shiva) some of their spiritual profile and practices. This confluence of the faster-running tributaries of Buddhism and Hinduism remains a major cultural feature of the Newari community in Kathmandu, that city’s human core: intense, mystical, sometimes dark. Centuries after Buddhism had faded in India, Tibetan scholars would still be trying to figure out what tantric practice really implied.

  Piecing together the emergence of the Tibetan state, a process that began in the seventh century, is far from simple. When the British diplomat Charles Bell published one of the first Western accounts of early Tibetan history in 1924, he drew in particular on the Blue Annals, completed in 1476, centuries after the events they described. And as Bell himself observed, Tibetan historiography was usually more concerned with the progress of religion and its institutions, not the rise and fall of rival political factions or economic development. Following the dharma or spiritual path of Buddhism has been a largely cohesive force on the plateau of Tibet for a thousand years but it wasn’t inevitable, even if those Tibetan histories make it seem so. What we do know is that a dynasty emerged from Tibet’s Yarlung valley in the seventh century that dominates the historical landscape, and it was largely in the wake of its emergence that, over the next two centuries, Buddhism took root. Remarkably, what began as illiterate animist clans making fragmentary appearances in Chinese chronicles, feuding in a remote backwater, became, within a few generations, an empire that stretched from the Pamir mountains in the far west to northern Myanmar in the east, and from the Gobi in the north to Nepal in the south, with a brief occupation of China’s Tang dynasty capital at Chang’an. This stratospheric rise of the Yarlung dynasty transformed Tibetan culture and gave Tibet its own alphabet; only then was the way opened to its future as a holy land, where Buddhism prospered even as it dwindled in India, in the face of expansionist Islam and resurgent Hinduism.

  Two key sources found at Dunhuang transformed our understanding of this critical period, as Tibet emerged on the world stage. The Tibetan Annals, originally one scroll, now held in two portions in London and Paris, covers the early reign of Songtsen Gampo, ‘Songtsen the Wise’, the first Tibetan emperor, recording important events and genealogies, including clan affiliations, from the middle of the seventh century to the year 764, when the fragments Stein and Pelliot brought back to Europe end. The second document is known as the Old Tibetan Chronicle, a potent blend of narrative, songs and various lists that tells the story of the Tibetan emperors from their mythical beginnings, through the reign of Songtsen Gampo, and on into the ninth century. The list of emperors named ends with U Dumtsen, also known as Langdarma, an equivocal figure in the Tibetan imagination, as someone who attempted to suppress Buddhism. The chronicle was most likely composed in the ninth century, although the Hungarian scholar Géza Uray believed the manuscript, written on chopped-up segments of a Chinese scroll, had been rearranged later for political reasons. The discovery of these sources gave scholars a powerful new vantage point from which to view Tibet’s emergence as a major power in Central Asia, one not so cluttered with Tibet’s later religious sense of itself. Charles Bell, for example, followed Tibet’s later medieval histories in regarding Songtsen Gampo as an ardent supporter of Buddhism, a young king converted by his foreign wives who ordered monasteries built across the land. He is known as the first of the three ‘dharma kings’, and regarded as an emanation of Tibet’s protective deity Avalokitesvara, Chenrezig in Tibetan, the Buddha of compassion. But there is no mention in either the Old Tibetan Chronicle or the Tibetan Annals of Songtsen Gampo having been a Buddhist at all.

  Songtsen was born a tsenpo – a king – and a lhase, or divine son, thirty-third in a line of kings whose origins are lost in time and whose gods are largely forgotten. The first of them was Nyatri Tsenpo, dropped to earth on Yarlha Shampo, a sacred mountain in the Yarlung valley, on the end of a sky-cord
that drew him back to heaven when his time came. The Tibetan calendar and Losar, the New Year, are said to have begun with his reign. An ancient fortress called Yumbu Lhakang that stands on a cliff above the Yarlung valley is traditionally associated with Nyatri. It is certainly old, a narrow white tower, windowless at the bottom, overlooking the fields that sustained its inhabitants. The chronicles tell how this sequence of kings lost its divinity through the foolish behaviour of the tsenpo Drigum who turned clan chiefs first against each other and then against himself. The sky-cord was severed forever and Drigum was buried in the ground. No one, including the great Dalai Lamas, ruled all Tibet without managing the concerns of the clans.

  Songtsen himself died in 649 and the account of his funeral offers clues to the nomadic origins of the Yarlung kings, hinting at influences from neither India nor China but the steppe. Herodotus had heard how the Scythians lacerated their bodies as part of their mourning; Tibetan nobles did the same, painting their faces with ochre and cutting off their hair. Echoes of the steppe accompanied Songtsen to his burial place, shaped like a nomad’s tent. Like the nearby Turkic peoples, the Tibetans believed their king lived on inside his tomb, surrounded with his things from life, seated in his copper coffin, his old servants close at hand, those who had sworn allegiance raising a stone pillar and swearing an oath.

  If his death was rooted in the past, Songtsen’s life transformed that of the plateau. His father Namri Lontsen had extended their clan’s power, forging links with other clans, expanding their control into central Tibet. During his reign, Namri had sent ambassadors to the Chinese court and made alliances with the powers that surrounded him: Zhang Zhung to the west and to the north-east a confederacy of tribes known as the Azha in Tibetan, and Tuyuhun to the Chinese, expert horse-breeders inhabiting what would become part of the Tibetan province of Amdo. This region was of much more concern to China, then emerging from chaos under the new Tang dynasty. To the south, across the mountains in the fertile valley of Kathmandu, was the Licchavi king, Amshuverma, controlling an important trans-Himalayan trade route and building a fabulous palace with the proceeds. The people he ruled were already famous for their metalwork. Beyond Amshuverma was the Indian king Harsha, who, aged just sixteen, had inherited the throne from his murdered brother, avenging his death and creating an empire.

  Songtsen would do something similar. After his father was poisoned, he inherited the title of tsenpo aged just thirteen. Reacting to the loss of a strong leader, the affiliated clans rose up. Songtsen responded quickly, capturing and executing the man who had killed his father and putting down the insurrection against his family. Where his father had been content to secure treaties, Songtsen wanted absolute control. He subjugated the west and in 634 sent envoys to the Chinese court. Songtsen’s reputation as a capable and bellicose military leader had gone before him, so the Chinese reciprocated quickly, being preoccupied with better known rivals, the Turks and the Azha to the north. China’s experienced emperor Taizong saw potential in recruiting Songtsen as an ally against the Azha. The Tibetans were delighted; such diplomatic respect raised their status.

  Knowing that Taizong had promised Chinese noblewomen as brides to the rulers of the Turks and the Azha, Songtsen sent another envoy to Taizong requesting the same. It was an astute act of statecraft on both sides, a mark of respect to the rising Tibetan king, but also an obligation to the Chinese emperor. At first the Chinese agreed, but at the insistence of the Azha ruler, Murong Nuohebo, who happened to be at court, the offer was withdrawn. Songtsen was furious and immediately launched a powerful attack on the Azha, his army reinforced with troops from his recent conquests in the west, scattering his enemies. Within a few years, Tibet would add this vast region to its empire. Songtsen then continued to the frontier with China at Sungchou, modern Songpan, some three hundred kilometres north of Chengdu, and sent gifts to the emperor, saying he had come for his princess. Without waiting for a reply, he then attacked the city.

  What happened next depends on whose annals you read. The Tang chroniclers claim a Chinese general drove Songtsen back. Tibetan chroniclers suggest the tsenpo withdrew his army in the face of a larger force and continued harrying Taizong’s armies. The latter seems more plausible. If Songtsen had been defeated, as the Tang claimed, they would not have so readily entertained Songtsen’s renewed demand for a bride. In 641 he sent his shrewdest counsellor, Gar Tongtsen, to the Tang capital at Chang’an, the city of perpetual peace, to negotiate the marriage. Chang’an was then the greatest city in the world, with a population of a million inside its city walls and two million outside. Chang’an had scores of Buddhist and Taoist temples, but it was ecumenical and tolerant, with Nestorian Christian churches and Zoroastrian temples as well. There were pleasure gardens with a lake you could boat on and festivals to entertain the people. Taizong had recently built a palace in his hunting park north of the city. There was a fascination too for the exotic: Turkic styles were then all the rage. People from all over the known world came to Chang’an, Japanese pilgrims and Jewish traders. The city brimmed with self-confidence. Its famous markets, at the end of the Silk Roads, sold everything anyone wanted.

  Given the wealth on display at court and the disdain Chinese elites expressed towards ‘barbarians’, and that by force of circumstance Gar Tongtsen was illiterate, it says a great deal that Songtsen’s ambassador impressed Taizong. There is an image of their encounter, the original painted by the government official Yan Liben, hanging in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Gar is shown in red and gold Chinese silks, hands pressed together, in front of Taizong, who is being carried on an open sedan chair by nine servant women, all identical. Even if Gar impressed Taizong, the power dynamic Yan Liben conveys is clear: Gar is a supplicant from a weaker power. Later Tibetan histories expanded on his reputation for cleverness, how he outfoxed the Chinese to bring home not just Songtsen’s bride but one for himself as well. Gar Tongtsen’s wiliness appeals to Tibetans, who have often relied on their wits to overcome such a vast numerical disadvantage. (‘There is no disputing the matter of numbers,’ Gar Tongtsen’s son once told an arrogant Chinese general. ‘But many small birds are the food of a single hawk, and many small fish are the food of a single otter.’)

  The girl Gar brought home was a young teenage princess called Wencheng, not Taizong’s daughter, but a relative from a junior noble family. The annals suggest she was intended for Songtsen’s son and heir, and it was only because his son died young that Songtsen married her himself. In doing so, he achieved a peace that lasted for a decade or more after his death in 649. Among the gifts Wencheng brought with her was a statue of the Buddha, the first recorded in Tibet, although there were most probably Buddhists in Tibet already. Her story is used in modern Chinese schools as a clumsy illustration of China’s deep-rooted connection to Tibet, a big uncle guiding a little nephew, with Tibet a tributary of the motherland. The reality was very different: these were powerfully different cultures, from how they conceived the world to what they ate and how they drank their tea. Songtsen is often credited as introducing Tibet to its favourite beverage, but recent archaeological discoveries suggest tea had been in Tibet for centuries before his reign. This might explain how wholly different its preparation is from tea drunk in China: salt and butter are blended into it, and the tea itself arrives in a dried, brick form, useful for nomadic lifestyles.

  Even so, as its empire grew, Tibet’s interactions with China changed its culture. This shift is neatly illustrated in the change of name of Songtsen’s new capital, from Rasa, meaning ‘walled place’, to Lhasa: ‘place of the gods’. Like elite families across Central Asia, Tibetan aristocrats sent their sons to Chang’an to be educated and to see what the rest of the world had to offer; they returned with new ideas and tastes. Through his ambassador Gar, Songtsen asked Taizong for silkworms and the techniques for making wine. Most importantly, understanding very well the power of the written word, he asked for artisans to teach Tibet how to make paper and ink. That allowed government
to be regularised and properly constituted. The very existence of the annals at Dunhuang illustrates the impact the Chinese had on the Tibetan elite, which absorbed the Chinese habit of recording itself, an interesting contrast to the subcontinent, where literature was more metaphysical.

  For historians, Tang records and Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang are powerful documentary sources. Yet their focus on matters of state and military rivalry make it easy to underplay the immense cultural influence from the south side of the Himalaya, which was closer than China and a longstanding source of trade and cultural contact. Throughout the 630s, the king of the Kathmandu valley (in modern-day Nepal), Narendradeva, a descendant of the Licchavi king Amshuverma, took refuge in Lhasa to escape a coup, and spent several years there plotting his return. Part of the legend of Songtsen’s reign is that he had not one but two foreign wives, the first of them being a Nepali bride, a daughter of Amshuverma, the princess Bhrikuti. According to legend, like Wencheng she also brought a statue of the Buddha to the marriage. Many scholars have doubted her existence – there is no mention of her in the Dunhuang manuscripts – but another marriage into an important neighbouring elite is entirely plausible. It’s certainly the case that Narendradeva, who wore an amulet of the Buddha, returned to Kathmandu with support from Tibetan troops, which is why, the Tang recorded, he was subject to Lhasa. The impact of these Licchavi nobles on the Tibetan court hasn’t left the same record as China did, but it must still have been significant. Amshuverma had worked on a Sanskrit grammar, according to the famous Chinese Buddhist monk and traveller Xuanzang. That must have interested Songtsen. When it came to inventing a script for his language, Songtsen would turn to Sanskrit, much as a medieval European scholar would turn to Latin. There is a story that Songtsen, after many previous attempts, commissioned a young man from the Tonmi clan to travel to India and study writing with a famous Brahmin. The teacher’s initial scepticism was overturned by the diligence of his student, so much so that he awarded the young man the nickname Sambhota: ‘the good Tibetan’. Whether or not it’s true, Songtsen’s commitment to literacy and its impact on Tibetan culture were both impressive and profound. Decades later a Chinese minister described Tibetans as ‘intelligent and sharp, and untiring in their love of study’. It was meant as a warning.