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Iranians in the Tibetan Empire

on persian exiles, sogdian envoys and khotanese monks, seventh to ninth centuries

Contents 9 sections
  1. IIntroduction
  2. IIThe last Sasanians
  3. IIIArmour, and a silk at Dulan
  4. IVSogdians on the trade roads
  5. VKhotan
  6. VIA doctor from the west
  7. VIIThe Zoroastrian thesis
  8. VIIIKham and the eastern plateau
  9. IXWorks consulted

Introduction

The Tibetan empire and the Arab conquest of Iran rose in the same generation. Songtsen Gampo united the plateau in the 630s and 640s. The last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, was killed near Merv in 651. Between the two lay Central Asia, full of Iranian-speaking peoples: Sogdians around Samarkand, Bactrians around Balkh, the Saka of Khotan.

A theory has grown up that the collapse of Iran fed the rise of Tibet. Persian refugees, it says, fled east from the Arabs, found sanctuary with the Tibetans and taught them imperial warfare, and Iranian settlers moved on into eastern Tibet. This essay sets out what supports that picture and what does not. Iranians certainly reached Tibet in these centuries. Most of them were not Persian exiles. They were Sogdian traders and envoys and Khotanese Buddhist monks.

The last Sasanians

The Persian royal family did flee east, but toward China. Yazdegerd’s son Peroz took refuge in Tokharistan and sent embassies to the Tang court asking for help against the Arabs. In 661 the Tang recognised him as head of a “Persian Area Command”, Bosi dudufu, a title that gave him little more than a name. He ended his life in Chang’an.

His son Narseh got as far as an army. In 679 the Tang general Pei Xingjian set out with him to restore the Persian throne. The expedition’s real target was a Western Turkic claimant, Ashina Duzhi, who was in revolt against the Tang. Pei captured him, and the army stopped in Tokharistan. Narseh stayed on there for years, fighting the Arabs, before returning to Chang’an, where he died (Encyclopaedia Iranica).

Tibet touched these events only at the edges. The Western Turks were its sometime allies, and Tibet and the Tang were then fighting over the Tarim basin. By 670 Tibetan armies had taken all four Tang garrisons there (Berzin, “The Empire of the Early Kings of Tibet”).

Armour, and a silk at Dulan

The case for Persians at the Tibetan court rests on two things.

The first is armour. The Tang encyclopedist Du You wrote in his Tongdian that Tibetan soldiers wore chain mail of extremely fine workmanship, which covered them completely and left openings only for the eyes, and that their horses were armoured too. Christopher Beckwith cites the passage. Matteo Compareti sets beside it the late Sasanian relief at Taq-e Bostan, which shows a horseman armoured from head to foot. The Russian scholar A. Nikitin went further and suggested that Iranians arriving at Lhasa in the seventh century gave “a great impulse to the development and organization of the Tibetan military power” (Compareti).

The second is a silk. At Dulan in Qinghai, in the old kingdom of the Tuyuhun that Tibet conquered between 655 and 666, a cemetery of the eighth and ninth centuries has yielded textiles and metalwork with Sogdian motifs, and a silk fragment inscribed in Pahlavi, the script of Sasanian Iran. Compareti calls the inscription the only unquestionable evidence of relations between Persia and Tibet, and notes that a non-Persian could have written it. Even if Nikitin’s suggestion is accepted, he concludes, only the Dulan inscription and a few coins support a conspicuous Persian presence at the court of Lhasa.

Retellings of the refugee theory often list a paper by Nikitin and G. Roth among their sources. That paper describes something else: Sasanian and Sasanian-style coins countermarked with a winged animal and the Sogdian word farn, “glory”, probably in Sogdiana, Tokharistan or northern India late in the seventh century (Nikitin and Roth 1995). It shows Iranian money moving through the region. It says nothing about Tibet.

Dulan matters for another reason. It lies on the northeastern edge of the plateau, in Amdo. If Iranians reached eastern Tibet, this is where the evidence is.

Sogdians on the trade roads

Sogdians are far better documented. They ran the caravan trade from Samarkand to China, and Tibet lay beside their routes. They bought Tibetan musk, among the most valued goods the plateau produced, and brought silks and metalwork in exchange (Compareti).

At Tangtse in Ladakh, on the road from Leh toward western Tibet, a rock carries three crosses of the Church of the East beside a Sogdian inscription:

In the year 210, we, … of Samarkand, together with the monk Nosh-farn, were sent as messengers to the Qaghan of Tibet.

Tangtse, Ladakh (Sims-Williams 1993)

The year is usually placed in the ninth century. The inscription is among the latest evidence for Sogdians on the Himalayan roads, and it shows a Christian monk from Samarkand travelling as an envoy to the Tibetan emperor.

Tibet’s dealings with the Arabs belong to the same world. In 715 Tibet switched sides to ally with the Umayyad general Qutayba, whom it had been fighting, and in 717 it agreed to receive a Muslim teacher at the request of the caliph Umar II (Berzin, “Tibet at the Arrival of the First Muslim Teacher”). The Iranian principalities on Tibet’s western flank were passing, in those decades, under Arab rule.

Khotan

The Iranian people with the deepest ties to Tibet were the Khotanese. Khotan, on the southern rim of the Taklamakan, was a Buddhist kingdom whose language, Khotanese Saka, is Iranian. Its own legend made its founder Kustana a son of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. The Tang brought it into their protectorate in the seventh century. Tibet took it with the other garrisons by 670, lost it, and took it back in 790 (Berzin, “The Empire of the Early Kings of Tibet”).

Khotanese monks came to Tibet as refugees. The Chinese princess Jincheng, wife of the Tibetan emperor Me Agtsom, gave asylum to monks fleeing a persecution in Khotan and had seven monasteries built for them, one of them in Lhasa. Berzin dates the asylum to 725 in one account and to 737 in another. The Prophecy of the Li Country, a Khotanese Buddhist history preserved in the Tibetan canon, tells the story. When the princess died in a smallpox epidemic in 739, the ministers blamed the foreign monks and their rites, and sent them on to Gandhara, ruled by Tibet’s Buddhist allies the Turki Shahis. Many of them settled in the mountains of Baltistan (Berzin, “From King Songtsen Gampo to King Trisong Detsen”; van Schaik 2011). The story of the Muslims of that same country is told in The Muslims of Little Tibet.

Khotan stayed Buddhist until the Qarakhanids, Turkic Muslims, took it around 1006. Rong Xinjiang has argued that the news of its fall is what moved the monks of Dunhuang to seal Cave 17, the library that kept the Dunhuang manuscripts hidden until 1900 (Rong 1999 to 2000).

A doctor from the west

Tibetan medical histories add one more western visitor. When King Songtsen Gampo fell ill, they say, physicians were invited from India, China and the west, and the western one, “the Taksik or Phrom doctor Galenos”, stayed on at court. Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim traced the story and found that Galen enters these histories only in the seventeenth century. Earlier Tibetan sources do not know him (Yoeli-Tlalim 2012). The story says more about how later Tibetans pictured the west than about who attended the seventh-century court.

The Zoroastrian thesis

Some writers go further and argue for a long friendship between Zoroastrian Iran and the plateau. K. E. Eduljee, writing on Zoroastrian heritage, notes that Tagzig, the Bonpo land of origin, is thought to be a form of Tajik, that the name Shenrab “has an Iranian sound”, and that Bon shares with Zoroastrianism a strong dualism and the memory of a perfect original homeland. He suggests that relations between Sasanian Iran and the peoples of the plateau were collaborative and outlasted the Arab conquest.

The resemblances are worth noticing. The evidence for contact, though, runs mostly through Buddhist Central Asia, through Khotan, Sogdiana and the old Kushan lands, and not through Zoroastrian Iran directly. The Bonpo side of that story is told in The Nine Ways of Bon, and the name Tagzig itself in The Tribe in the Tantra.

Kham and the eastern plateau

The eastern plateau, Kham and Amdo, had peoples of its own. Chinese linguists and anthropologists call Kham the ethnic corridor of southwest China: more than a dozen distinct peoples live there, and about a third of its inhabitants speak Qiangic languages, related to Tibetan only distantly. When the Tibetan empire broke apart in the mid-ninth century, the region split into local principalities that kept their independence from Lhasa and from China alike. Its people were known as horsemen and fighters. The Tea-Horse Road ran through both Kham and Amdo, carrying Chinese tea west and Tibetan horses east.

Bon has stayed strong in both regions, and the oral Gesar epic is most alive there and in Ladakh in the far west, the two areas most associated with the old Bonpo (Okar Research).

What the record does not show is an Iranian migration into Kham. The Iranian traces on the eastern plateau are at Dulan, in Amdo, and they are Sogdian goods and one Pahlavi silk in a Tuyuhun cemetery under Tibetan rule. They point to trade, and perhaps to a handful of people. A settled Iranian population in eastern Tibet would have left more.

Works consulted