ABSTRACT
Given Tibet’s historical association with Buddhism, Tibetan communities belonging to other faiths such as Islam and Christianity have so far received little public or scholarly attention. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, communities of Tibetan Catholics have been living in remote mountain villages in the border areas of Tibet, Yunnan and Sichuan. To the Tibetan Catholics, August 11 is an important date. On this day in 1949, a young Swiss priest from the Order of Grand Saint Bernard, Father Maurice Tornay, was on an arduous and dangerous trek to Lhasa to seek the Dalai Lama’s permission to proselytize in Tibet. He had decided on this course of action as his mission station at Yerkalo, in south-eastern Tibet, had suffered constant attacks by anti-Christian forces led by local Buddhist leaders. Tornay thought that the last hope for Christianity’s presence in the Land of Snow lay in an appeal to Tibet’s highest religious authority. He never made it to Lhasa. His enemies heard about his itinerary and ambushed his party at a place called Choula; Tornay and one of his companions lost their lives on that windy mountain pass. The perpetrators must have thought that getting rid of Tornay would spell the end of the Catholic presence in the Tibetan regions. Little did they expect that Tornay would later be beatified by the Vatican and these days he is venerated by Tibetan Catholics as a martyr and saint. Half a century after Tornay’s death, Catholicism still clings on tenaciously in this tiny corner of Tibet. Tornay was neither the first nor the only missionary killed for their faith
whilst trying to bring Tibet into the fold of the universal Church. The social memory of the present-day Catholic Tibetan community include traumatic and heroic stories of the martyrdom of French and Swiss missionaries, some of whose graves have become pilgrimage sites where the faithful gather to pray for rain and other forms of blessing. Tornay’s death, however, marked an important turning point in the history of the Tibet mission, because it coincided with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in China’s civil war and the establishment of the new state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He was one of the last foreign clergymen to operate in the country,
and his demise cast a grim pall over the end of an era. The founding and consolidation of the PRC eventually brought forth new dynamics and a new set of challenges in Church-state relations, engendered mainly through the changing nature of state authority and its attitude towards religion. For, unlike the pre-revolutionary imperial state and its successor that was the Nationalist government, the Chinese state, under the rule of the Communist Party from 1949 onwards, explicitly adheres to the materialist ideology of atheism. One issue that has constantly been the source of contention throughout the
whole history of the Tibet mission is that regarding the ‘foreignness’ of Christianity. To this day, Christianity is still widely seen by non-believers in China as a ‘foreign religion’, similar to the situation in Japan described in Gregory Vanderbilt’s chapter in this volume. And given the strong association of the Buddhist faith and Tibetan identity, for the Tibetan Catholics the issue of the ‘foreignness’ of their religion is all the more pressing as they interact with other Tibetans, the Chinese state and the wider public. The discussion in this chapter seeks to achieve two main aims: First, to present an up-to-date ethnographic account of the ways the Tibetan Catholics practise their religion. Presently available anthropological and historical material on the Tibetan Catholics is restricted to accounts by missionaries and a number of scholars up to the late 1940s, prior to the founding of the PRC. The material presented in this chapter therefore fills the lacuna of research by examining the impact of China’s post-1949 socialist transformations and the current wave of socioeconomic development. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out periodically between 2005 and
2007 among Catholic Tibetan communities in south-eastern Tibet and northwestern Yunnan. In these visits, I lived with Catholic Tibetan families and conducted extensive formal and informal interviews with the community and two Tibetan priests. In this chapter, I want to examine the ways in which Tibetan Catholics have practised their faith in the face of the wider perception of the ‘foreignness’ of their religion. In what ways does a Tibetan community being ‘Christian’ influence its political relationships with Chinese authorities and its share of state resources? How do they respond to the prevalent media portrayal and the public imagination of a strong correlation between Tibetan-ness and Buddhism? At the same time, I am aware of the potential problems in highlighting the issue of ‘foreignness’. For one thing, a continuous discussion of foreignness can undermine the effort by the Christians and others in China who have been trying hard to indigenize the faith to make it part of the cultural landscape of China today (e.g. Madsen 2001). In addition, since the 1980s, there has been a growing number of Chinese intellectuals, both Christian and non-Christian, writing on Christian history, culture and theology. These intellectuals, sometimes known as the ‘Cultural Christians’ (Zhuo 2001), have sought to investigate the role of Christianity in the process of Chinese modernization and its cultural movements. Many are concerned with the indigenization of Christianity in China and the formation of an indigenous Church. Despite these developments, Christians in China in
general, and the Tibetan Catholics in particular, still face tremendous challenges in practising their faith – challenges often associated with different aspects of the perceived ‘foreignness’ of their religion. In the course of the discussion, this chapter also seeks to demonstrate the importance of charting the evolution of state policies to our understanding of Church-state relations.
The Vatican sent its first wave of missionaries to Tibet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For a while, members of the Jesuit and Capuchin orders managed to establish a small number of mission stations in a few places in southern Tibet as well as in Lhasa. However, the missionaries were forced to abandon their effort and a small number of converts in the eighteenth century after encountering opposition from some sections of the Tibetan religious and political elite. A new effort to convert the Tibetans had to wait until a century later, when European powers established their imperial presence in Asia. In 1846, Pope Gregory XVI established the Vicariate Apostolic of Lhasa, and assigned the responsibility for Tibet’s mission work to the Société des Missionaires Étrangères de Paris (Paris Foreign Missions, abbreviated as MEP). By this time, the MEP missionaries had already established themselves in Sichuan, the Chinese province bordering eastern Tibet, and hence it made sense to assign the task of converting the Tibetans to the MEP. The Vicariate chose the western Sichuan town of Dajianlu (Tatsienlu, now known as Kangding), as its base from where missionaries would try to penetrate the heart of Tibet. In Tibet proper, the first MEP mission was set up at Bonga in south-eastern
Tibet in 1854. Apart from bringing the Christian faith, the missionaries also introduced potatoes and cabbage to the area. For the MEP, Bonga was only a stepping-stone; the ultimate prize was Lhasa and the conversion of the Tibetan elite. However, that prize proved to be unattainable, and part of the reason, and the irony, is that the Bonga mission became rather successful in attracting converts, it had around 700 by 1863. In the same year, the Tibetan authorities, wary of the apparent success of the French missionaries, issued an edict commanding all converts to re-embrace Buddhism or face severe punishment. Several factors arrayed against the missionaries. One, as mentioned previously, the success of the missionaries in gaining converts posed a direct threat to the interests of the local monasteries, which depended heavily on the peasants in the area for their material income. There was a further geopolitical consideration behind Lhasa’s issuance of the expulsion orders: in the 1860s, the British were gaining influence in Sikkim, south of the Tibetan border, from where the Tibetan government worried that the British might invade Tibet. The simultaneous presence of the French missionaries in eastern Tibet, who often presented themselves as official representatives of France, caused the Lhasa authorities to suspect that the French were also preparing to invade their country.
