Welcome back. So this week I'm going to be covering a lot of ground, seeing as I'm kind

of combining two lectures into one, and I think that that's a good thing, because with

everything going on in the news, 14th to 16th century Sino-Tibetan politics is almost certainly

the first thing on everybody's mind. But even if it's not, we're going to be discussing

the Padma Dhrupa dynasty, the fall of the Yuan, the rise of the Ming, and some of the

ways in which that changed relations between the political factions on the Tibetan Plateau

and lowland central and eastern China. And we'll lay the groundwork for the rise of the

Ganden Pocang, the government of the Dalai Lamas. But it's really a lot, so I'm going

to, I'm not going to be able to do much more than a survey, just fly over central concepts

and important figures. This really is a section where the reading is required to flesh out

my lecturing as opposed to the other way around. Now I want to start with the Pagma Drupal

dynasty. That's a term that you'll be seeing constantly in your reading right now. The

Pagma Drupal was less a centralized dynasty, as you'd see in Imperial China, for example,

and more of a dynastic regime that emerged from the collaboration of leaders of the Pagma

Drupal sect, which was yet another Kagyu subsect, and a powerful aristocratic family known as

the Lang clan. The Pagma Drupal started to rise to power in the early to mid-14th century

towards the end of the Yuan dynasty. And then after the decline of the Sakya hegemony, they

basically dominated the political landscape of Tibet until the mid-15th century. But they

didn't vanish. The Pagma Drupal were still pretty important players in central Tibetan

politics up to the beginning of the 17th century, more or less. So think of them a little bit

like the House of Borgia in 15th to 18th century Italian politics, and less like a centralized

medieval divine-right kingship. So more House of Borgia and less the Vatican, to extend

my Italian civics metaphor. The term Pagma Drupal derives from the name of a central

Tibetan hermitage named Pagma Dhu, which means something like a pig fort or a place where

pigs can cross a river, a pig-fairy crossing, if you will. Which might sound a little bit

strange but if you think of city names like Oxford, which means literally a place where

oxen can ford or cross a river, it's not really that strange at all. But their base

of power was historically located between Densatyl Monastery in central Tibet and the

fortified palace of Neidong, which is in modern day Shanan, not far from where the Yarlung

dynasty. Got its start way back in weeks two and three. And as we conceive of it now, the

Pagma Drupal dynasty was founded by an influential monastic figure named Changchup Yeltsin or

Tai Situ Changchup Yeltsin. He was a member of the Lung family or Lung clan, which was

a central Tibetan clannish faction that controlled a miriarchy, one of these Mongolian administrative

districts that were established in the 13th century. And they had also gained the favor

of a powerful Mongolian faction as well. While the Sakya were busy consolidating patronage

from Kublai Khan and the later Yuan emperors, the Lung clan had cultivated the patronage

of one of Kublai's rivals, the Khan of the Il Khanate, which was a southwestern Mongolian

khanate that controlled most of modern day Iran, Turkmenistan, Turkey, and Afghanistan,

as well as parts of Pakistan and Iraq. So the Lung enjoyed the patronage of an extremely

powerful khanate, but one that was not as relevant in central and East Asian politics

as the patrons of the Sakya in the early 14th century. And the Il Khanate kind of collapsed

in the mid-1350s for a variety of factors, but they were still very relevant during the

rise of Pagmodrupa power and would have been influential patrons, particularly in western

and central Tibet. Now, when Changshup Yeltsin became the head of the Pagmodrupa order, his

a myriarchy was a total mess. His predecessor, Yeltsin Khyap, appears to have been either

utterly incompetent or enormously greedy and hedonistic, or maybe both. Rather than administering

his myriarchy, he had, in essence, used the soldiers at his command to loot and plunder

all of the monasteries and aristocratic buildings within his territory. So he was systematically

raiding and pillaging his own territories to increase his personal wealth. Think of

him as Joffrey from Game of Thrones. So after a decade or so of incompetent and iron-fisted