ABSTRACT
The Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri is commonly celebrated for his appreciation of Tibetan philosophy, religion, and art. Missionaries suppressed much of what they knew about rural Tibet and Tibetans in order to a coherent missionary strategy founded on the understanding of Tibet as a civilized, courtly, and economically modern nation. Although the descriptions of Tibet and Tibetans in the accounts of early modern missionaries vary in tone and judgment, the subjects they took up were surprisingly uniform. If European powers were to enter the region, they needed to know the very things about the land and its inhabitants that we find in the missionaries’ accounts. The first Franciscans to travel to Lhasa made use of an Armenian trade network that stretched from Western Europe to the Philippines. Control of Western Tibet allowed the Ganden Phodrang government to maximize profits from its gold fields and monopolize the wool trade from Kashmir.
