ABSTRACT
Tibet in the early twentieth century is often depicted as isolated and uninterested in any form of change or progress, despite the significant modernization efforts Tibetans made at this time, spearheaded by the thirteenth Dalai Lama Tupten Gyatso (1876–1933) and some members of the Tibetan aristocracy. After Tibet's defeat by the British forces led by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband in 1904, the thirteenth Dalai Lama, in conjunction with Dasang Damdul Tsarong (1888–1959) and other government officials, initiated a broad-scale modernization effort including building up the Tibetan army, developing agricultural technology, and creating a post office and bank. After the fall of the Manchu-controlled Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) in which Tibet had been subsumed, the thirteenth Dalai Lama declared Tibet an independent country. He sought to create communication avenues between Tibet and the outside world by installing a telegraph system and sending a number of aristocratic boys to be educated in England as well as opening an English school in the central Tibetan town of Gyantsé for them (Tsarong 2000; Kapstein 2006: 172). However, despite these genuine attempts to modernize Tibet, conservative factions within the Tibetan government, especially monastic elites, resisted these changes for fear that foreign influences were anti-Buddhist and would threaten their monopoly on power. The Gelukpa monastic establishment had profound influence over the Tibetan government and succeeded in convincing the Dalai Lama to devalue modernization and militarization, and in 1925 he closed the newly launched progressive projects (Cabezón 2008: 263–4; Goldstein, 1997: 35).
