The Panchen Lama is a tulku of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. The Panchen Lama is one of the most important figures in the Gelug tradition, with its spiritual authority second only to the Dalai Lama. Along with the council of high lamas, he is in charge of seeking out the next Dalai Lama. Panchen is a portmanteau of Pandita and Chenpo, meaning "great scholar".
Kham is one of the three traditional Tibetan regions, the others being Domey also known as Amdo in the northeast, and Ü-Tsang in central Tibet. The official name of this Tibetan region/province is Dotoe. The original residents of Kham are called Khampas, and were governed locally by chieftains and monasteries. Kham covers a land area distributed in multiple province-level administrative divisions in present-day China, most of it in Tibet Autonomous Region and Sichuan, with smaller portions located within Qinghai and Yunnan.
Xikang was a nominal province formed by the Republic of China in 1939 on the initiative of prominent Sichuan warlord Liu Wenhui and retained by the early People's Republic of China. The former territory of Xikang is now divided between the Tibet Autonomous Region and Sichuan province.
Thubten Choekyi Nyima (1883–1937), often referred to as Choekyi Nyima, was the ninth Panchen Lama of Tibet.
Reting Rinpoche was a title held by abbots of Reting Monastery, a Buddhist monastery in central Tibet.
The Xinhai Lhasa turmoil was an ethnic clash in Lhasa, Tibet, as well as a series of mutinies following the Wuchang Uprising. It effectively resulted in the end of Qing rule in Tibet.
Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme was a Tibetan senior official who assumed various military and political responsibilities both before and after 1951 in Tibet. He is often known simply as Ngapo in English sources.
The 1959 Tibetan uprising began on 10 March 1959, when a revolt erupted in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, which had been under the effective control of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since the Seventeen Point Agreement was reached in 1951. The initial uprising occurred amid general Chinese-Tibetan tensions and a context of confusion, because Tibetan protesters feared that the Chinese government might arrest the 14th Dalai Lama. The protests were also fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and separatism. At first, the uprising mostly consisted of peaceful protests, but clashes quickly erupted and the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) eventually used force to quell the protests. Some of the protesters had captured arms. The last stages of the uprising included heavy fighting, with high civilian and military losses. The 14th Dalai Lama escaped from Lhasa, while the city was fully retaken by Chinese security forces on 23 March 1959. Thousands of Tibetans were killed during the 1959 uprising, but the exact number of deaths is disputed.
Tibet came under the control of People's Republic of China (PRC) after the Government of Tibet signed the Seventeen Point Agreement which the 14th Dalai Lama ratified on 24 October 1951, but later repudiated on the grounds that he had rendered his approval for the agreement under duress. This occurred after attempts by the Tibetan Government to gain international recognition, efforts to modernize its military, negotiations between the Government of Tibet and the PRC, and a military conflict in the Chamdo area of western Kham in October 1950. The series of events came to be called the "Peaceful Liberation of Tibet" by the Chinese government, and the "Chinese invasion of Tibet" by the Central Tibetan Administration and the Tibetan diaspora.
Phüntsok Wangyal Goranangpa, also known as Phüntsog Wangyal, Bapa Phüntsok Wangyal or Phünwang, was a Tibetan politician. A major figure in modern Sino-Tibetan relations, he is best known for being the founder and leader of the Tibetan Communist Party. He was arrested by the Chinese authorities in 1960 and subsequently spent 18 years in the infamous Chinese high security prison Qincheng in solitary confinement. After his release he lived in Beijing until his death.
Tibet was a de facto independent state in East Asia that lasted from the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 until its annexation by the People's Republic of China in 1951.
The Sino-Tibetan War, also known as the Second Sino-Tibetan War, was a war that began in May and June 1930 when the Tibetan Army under the 13th Dalai Lama invaded the Chinese-administered eastern Kham region, and the Yushu region in Qinghai, in a struggle over control and corvée labor in Dajin Monastery. The Tibetan Army, with support of the British, easily defeated the Sichuan army, which was focused on internal fights. Ma clique warlord Ma Bufang secretly sent a telegram to Sichuan warlord Liu Wenhui and the leader of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek, suggesting a joint attack on the Tibetan forces. The Republic of China then defeated the Tibetan armies and recaptured its lost territory.
The Battle of Chamdo occurred from 6 to 24 October 1950. It was a military campaign by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to take the Chamdo Region from a de facto independent Tibetan state. The campaign resulted in the capture of Chamdo and the annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China.
Pandatsang Rapga was a Khampa revolutionary during the first half of the 20th century in Tibet. He was pro-Kuomintang and pro-Republic of China, anti-feudal, anti-communist. He believed in overthrowing the Dalai Lama's feudal regime and driving British imperialism out of Tibet, and acted on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in countering the Dalai Lama. He was later involved in rebelling against communist rule.
The 1934 Khamba rebellion was a rebellion in the western regions of Kham in Xikang against the Tibetan Government and the Sichuan Warlord Liu Wenhui. It consisted of Khamba tribesmen led by the Pandatsang family; two brothers of the family, Pandatsang Togbye and Pandatsang Rapga, led the revolt.
The Tibetan Army was the armed forces of Tibet from 1913 to 1959. It was established by the 13th Dalai Lama shortly after he proclaimed the independence of Tibet in 1912, and was modernised with the assistance of British training and equipment. It was dissolved by the Chinese government following the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising.
In 1910, Qing China sent a military force of 2,000 troops to Tibet, then a Qing protectorate, ostensibly to assert imperial authority. It led to turmoil in Tibet and caused the Dalai Lama to flee to British India. It also caused a serious rupture in Sino-Tibetan relations that eventually led to Tibet's declaration of independence in 1912.
Gyalo Thondup, born c.1927, is the second-eldest brother of the 14th Dalai Lama. He often acted as the Dalai Lama's unofficial envoy.
The priest and patron relationship, also written as priest-patron or cho-yon, is the Tibetan political theory that the relationship between Tibet and China referred to a symbiotic link between a spiritual leader and a lay patron, such as the historic relationship between the Dalai Lama and the Qing emperor. They were respectively spiritual teacher and lay patron rather than subject and lord. Chöyön is an abbreviation of two Tibetan words: chöney, "that which is worthy of being given gifts and alms", and yöndag, "he who gives gifts to that which is worthy".
Thubten Kunphel, commonly known as Kunphela, was a Tibetan politician and one of the most powerful political figures in Tibet during the later years of the 13th Dalai Lama's rule, known as the "strong man of Tibet". Kunphela was arrested and exiled after the death of the Dalai Lama in 1933. He later escaped to India and became a co-founder of the India-based Tibet Improvement Party with the aim of establishing a secular government in Tibet. He worked in Nanking after the attempt to start a revolution in Tibet failed, and returned to Tibet in 1948.
