So, welcome back to week four.

This week we're going to be talking about the actual historical rise, decline, and fall

of the Tibetan Empire, as well as its problematic relationships with the Tang dynasty.

I'm not going to get through all of the material that I would like in this week's lecture.

It's rather dense, so I'm going to tie about one-third of it into next week's lecture.

So we'll discuss the actual collapse and the period of fragmentation in next week's talk.

But just to get things going, this week's readings from Warren Smith begin by stating,

within a brief span of a little more than 200 years, a Tibetan political entity evolved

from the previously autonomous clans and petty states of central Tibet into a confederative

empire encompassing the entire Tibetan plateau and able to project its power into China and

inner Asia.

A national, cultural, and political identity corresponding to the territorial extent of

the Tibetan plateau was created by the empire and survived the empire's collapse.

It was in creating this sense of national identity that the Tibetan Empire was most significant.

This is the period and process that we'll be discussing today, and I'll be focusing

on the reigns of three Tibetan empires in particular, Chongsheng Gampo, Chisong Detsen,

and Chisuk Detsen, also known as Ralphachan.

Don't worry about the Tibetan names so much.

As I mentioned in the introductory lecture, when we talk about ethnocultural Tibet to

a certain extent, we're talking about a geographical region that roughly corresponds to the territories

conquered, controlled, and heavily influenced culturally by the Tibetan Empire, particularly

during the cultural and military height of the empire in the eighth century under Emperor

Chisong Detsen.

I think that Warren Smith goes a little bit too far in suggesting that a proto-national

identity was formed in Tibet through the standardization of spoken Tibetan and armed conflict with

neighboring empires.

Those elements were certainly very important in developing a certain shared homogeneous

cultural pattern, as well as political institutions and beliefs.

But we'll see much later in the 19th and early 20th century that the notion of Tibetan nationhood

in contemporary terms is a much more recent development that builds on the mythos and

geographical conquests of the Tibetan Empire, rather than being derived from the empire

directly.

That's going to be a theme in our lectures in weeks 10, 11, and 12.

Now I'm getting back to our narrative from last week.

We left off with the first properly historical emperor of Tibet, Tsongsheng Gampo, who had

just confederated the central Tibetan tribes in the rather large area surrounding Lhasa,

as well as southern tribes along the Yarlung River.

This was a strong strategic position, but Tsongsheng was surrounded by neighbors with

equally strong, if not stronger, military forces at their disposal, chiefly the Tsumpa

people, who were a semi-nomadic group living to the northeast of Tibet, who'd previously

rebelled against Tsongsheng Gampo's father, Namri Tsongshen.

To the west, there was the geographically larger and more populous kingdom of Shengshong.

And in the north, there were also the Aza, Tuyehun, as they're called in Chinese sources,

who were an Altaic people that lived in modern-day Qinghai.

And then, of course, there was the relatively new Tang dynasty to the east, which was rapidly

gaining power as they consolidated their rule following the political and economic collapse

of the Sui dynasty.

According to the Old Tibetan Chronicle, due to the strength of his neighbors, Tsongsheng

Gampo's territorial conquests proceeded more through shrewd politicking rather than by

outright warfare.