Welcome back. This week I'm going to be talking about the decline and fall of the Tibetan Empire in 842 CE.

In particular, the role that Buddhism and economics may have played in weakening the empire to the point where

a dynastic feud made the entire administrative structure of the empire collapse.

This led to the division of former imperial territories into a number of Tibetan-speaking petty kingdoms,

principalities, and clanish territories ruled by different feuding clans.

We'll discuss the ensuing period, which is sometimes called the Dark Age,

but is more commonly known as the period of fragmentation.

This lasts for about 150 years, from 842 to the late 10th century.

Then finally we'll talk about the Tibetan Renaissance,

which is a 200-year period stretching from the late 10th to the 12th centuries.

This is when some of the major Tibetan Buddhist sects are founded,

and Buddhism really emerges as the determinative cultural force

that dominates political and religious life on the Tibetan Plateau.

So, returning first to our narrative of military conquest and political intrigue,

I'd like to move forward from the reign of Tri-Song Detsen to Tri-Tsuk Detsen,

who's better known as Ralpachen, which is for the best because I really don't want to confuse you with Tibetan names and terms.

Ralpachen rules from 815 to 838 CE,

but there are a few developments between the reigns of the two emperors that are important to mention.

First, Buddhism continues to consolidate, becoming increasingly important for the rule of the empire.

Buddhist scribes, monastically trained administrators, and monks of the newly founded Ningma sect

had become indispensable to the functioning of the empire.

Translation and monastic construction projects also continued,

and there's a famous glossary of Buddhist terminology that's completed in 814.

This all serves to demonstrate that Buddhism had more or less become fully integrated into the Tibetan imperial administration,

and also served as an important aspect of its diplomatic connections to China in particular.

Secondly, Tibetan imperial territory was close to its height at the beginning of the 9th century.

They'd extended across much of modern-day Xinjiang and controlled a significant number of oasis trading cities along the Silk Roads,

most importantly the cities of Khotan and Dunhuang.

Economically, over time, the empire had evolved to have two main sources of income.

The first was through sheer military expansion, a little bit like the Roman Empire at its height,

the Tibetan Empire was dependent on military conflict and expansion to finance itself.

And the second source of income was trade.

At the beginning of Rapa Chend's reign, the Tibetans were firmly in control of the trade routes across the Tarim Basin,

which allowed them to tax and regulate trade between Tang dynastic territories

and both the Arab and Christian worlds, which was extremely lucrative, but also extremely dangerous.

It made the northern imperial territories a target for neighboring powers,

and should the money stop flowing in from military expansion,

the oasis cities could become too expensive and difficult to administrate and protect.

And, spoiler alert, this is more or less precisely what happened.

Now, a lot of this comes from Christopher Beckwith's book, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia,

which I'll recommend to anyone who wants to write a term paper on the imperial period.

In the first decade of the 9th century, the Tibetans were in near constant conflict

with the Abbasid Caliphate on their western frontier, and it was a war that they were slowly losing.

At the end of Trisong Detsen's reign, the Tibetans had pushed as far west as Samarkand and Kabul,

and they had in fact installed a Tibetan-speaking governor in Kabul at the end of the 8th century.

But the city fell to the Caliphate at some point between 812 and 815,

and the Abbasids continued pushing east after that point,

eventually being stopped by the Tibetans in eastern Kashmir,

which in a sense accounts for the religious and cultural makeup of the pre-modern border

between Tibet and Jammu and Kashmir.