Lhasa, officially the Chengguan District of Lhasa City, is the inner urban district of Lhasa City, Tibet Autonomous Region, Southwestern China.
The foreign relations of Tibet are documented from the 7th century onward, when Buddhism was introduced by missionaries from India and Nepal. The Tibetan Empire fought with the Tang dynasty for control over territory dozens of times, despite peace marriage twice. Tibet was conquered by the Mongol Empire and that changed its internal system of government, introducing the Dalai Lamas, as well as subjecting Tibet to political rule under the Yuan dynasty. Tibetan foreign relations during the Ming dynasty are opaque, with Tibet being either a tributary state or under full Chinese sovereignty. But by the 18th century, the Qing dynasty indisputably made Tibet a subject. In the early 20th century, after a successful invasion, Britain established a trading relationship with Tibet and was permitted limited diplomatic access to "Outer Tibet", basically Shigatse and Lhasa. Britain supported Tibetan autonomy under the 13th Dalai Lama but did not contest Chinese suzerainty; while "Inner Tibet", areas such as Amdo and Kham with mixed Chinese and Tibetan populations to the east and north, remained nominally under the control of the Republic of China although that control was seldom effective. Although the sovereignty of Tibet was unrecognized, Tibet was courted in unofficial visits from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the United States during and after World War II. The foreign relations of Tibet ended with the Seventeen Point Agreement that formalized Chinese sovereignty over most all of political Tibet in 1951.
The 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso was the 13th Dalai Lama of Tibet, enthroned during a turbulent modern era. He presided during the Collapse of the Qing Dynasty, and is referred to as "the Great Thirteenth", responsible for redeclaring Tibet's national independence, and for his national reform and modernization initiatives.
The 5th Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso was recognized as the 5th Dalai Lama, and he became the first Dalai Lama to hold both Tibet's political and spiritual leadership roles. He is often referred to simply as the Great Fifth, being the key religious and temporal leader of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet. He is credited with unifying all of Tibet under the Ganden Phodrang, after Gushri Khan's successful military interventions. As an independent head of state, he established priest and patron relations with both Mongolia and the Qing dynasty simultaneously, and had positive relations with other neighboring countries. He began the custom of meeting early European explorers. The 5th Dalai Lama built the Potala Palace, and also wrote 24 volumes' worth of scholarly and religious works on a wide range of subjects.
Tashi Lhunpo Monastery is an historically and culturally important monastery in Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet. Founded in 1447 by the 1st Dalai Lama, it is the traditional monastic seat of the Panchen Lama.
António de Andrade was a Jesuit priest and explorer from Portugal. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1596. From 1600 until his death in 1634, he was engaged in missionary activity in India. Andrade was the first known European to have crossed the Himalayas and reached Tibet, establishing the first Catholic mission on Tibetan soil.
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry Strachey (1816–1912) was a British officer of the Bengal Army. Despite a longstanding prohibition by the Tibetan authorities on the entry of Europeans into Tibet, Strachey surveyed parts of western Tibet during the late 1840s.
Tibetology refers to the study of things related to Tibet, including its history, religion, language, culture, politics and the collection of Tibetan articles of historical, cultural and religious significance. The last may mean a collection of Tibetan statues, shrines, Buddhist icons and holy scripts, Thangka embroideries, paintings and tapestries, jewellery, masks and other objects of fine Tibetan art and craftsmanship.
Ippolito Desideri, SJ was an Italian Jesuit missionary and traveller and the most famous of the early European missionaries who founded Catholic Church in Tibet. He was also the first documented Tibetologist and the first European to have successfully studied both Classical and Standard Tibetan.
Sarat Chandra Dash was an Indian scholar of Tibetan language and culture most noted for his two journeys to Tibet in 1879 and in 1881–1882.
Gombojab Tsybikov was a Russian explorer of Tibet from 1899 to 1902. Tsybikov specialized in ethnography, Buddhist Studies, and after 1917 was an important educator and statesman in Siberia and Mongolia.
Mana Pass or Chongnyi La is one of the highest vehicle-accessible passes in the world, containing a road constructed in the 2005-2010 period for the Indian military by the Border Roads Organisation and visible on 2011 imagery on visual globe systems such as Google Earth. The well-graded gravel-dirt road is higher on the Indian side than the new road on the Tibetan side, and rises to 5,610 metres (18,406 ft) on the Indian side of the border, 250 m west of the low point of the 5,632 metres (18,478 ft) Mana Pass SRTM.
Tsaparang was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Guge in the Garuda Valley, through which the upper Sutlej River flows, in Ngari Prefecture near the border of Ladakh. It is 278 km south-southwest of Senggezangbo Town and 26 km west of the 11th-century monastery at Tholing, and not far west of Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. The Tsaparang Dzong was located here. Nearby is the Bon monastery of Gurugem.
The main religion in Tibet has been Buddhism since its outspread in the 8th century AD. As of 2022 the historical region of Tibet is mostly comprised in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China and partly in the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan. Before the arrival of Buddhism, the main religion among Tibetans was an indigenous shamanic and animistic religion, Bon, which would later influence the formation of Tibetan Buddhism and still attracts the allegiance of a sizeable minority of Tibetans.
William Woodville Rockhill was a United States diplomat, best known as the author of the U.S.'s Open Door Policy for China, the first American to learn to speak Tibetan, and one of the West's leading experts on the modern political history of China.
Susanna "Susie" Carson Rijnhart, was a Canadian medical doctor, Protestant missionary, and Tibetan explorer. She was the second Western woman known to have visited Tibet, after Annie Royle Taylor.
The Battle of the Salween River was fought in September 1718 close to the Nagqu in Tibet, between an expedition of the Qing dynasty to Lhasa and a Dzungar Khanate force that blocked its path.
The Ganden Phodrang or Ganden Podrang was the Tibetan system of government established by the 5th Dalai Lama in 1642, when the Oirat lord Güshi Khan who founded the Khoshut Khanate conferred all spiritual and political power in Tibet to him in a ceremony in Shigatse. During the ceremony, the Dalai Lama "made a proclamation declaring that Lhasa would be the capital of Tibet and the government of would be known as Gaden Phodrang" which eventually became the seat of the Gelug school's leadership authority. The Dalai Lama chose the name of his monastic residence at Drepung Monastery for the new Tibetan government's name: Ganden (དགའ་ལྡན), the Tibetan name for Tushita heaven, which, according to Buddhist cosmology, is where the future Buddha Maitreya resides; and Phodrang (ཕོ་བྲང), a palace, hall, or dwelling. Lhasa's Red Fort again became the capital building of Tibet, and the Ganden Phodrang operated there and adjacent to the Potala Palace until 1959.
Samuel van der Putte was a Dutch explorer, linguist, and naturalist most famous for his journeys in Asia, especially to Tibet.
The Catholic Church is a minority religious organization in Tibet, where Tibetan Buddhism is the faith of the majority of people. Its origin dates from the 17th century, when António de Andrade, a Portuguese Jesuit through Jesuit missions in Tibet, introduced Catholicism into the Kingdom of Guge in western Tibet.
Asiaportal •
Chinaportal 
