Marching into View: The Tibetan Army in Historic Photographs 1895–1959

Alice Travers (1)

1 CRCAO - Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l'Asie Orientale

Tibetan civilisation is almost exclusively imagined through its monastic population and the religious form of its government. This volume seeks instead to shed light on one of its little-studied secular features: Tibet’s military prior to 1959. It focuses on the army of the Lhasa-based government known as the Ganden Phodrang, during the reigns of the 13th (1895-1933) and 14th Dalai lamas (1950-1959) and during the intervening period of regency (1933-1950). The Tibetan army, created to defend its Buddhist government, was mainly composed of two types of troops serving as a tax or corvée duty: a corps of permanent or regular troops (tenmag), whose first appearance dates to the 18th century; regional militia (yulmag), who guarded the borders and were summoned to serve alongside the Lhasa government’s regular troops when needed. This volume uses archival photographs, an underused historical source, to discover aspects of the Tibetan army history that scarcely appear in the written sources, such as its material culture (soldiers’ clothes and uniforms, insignia, military flags and banners, music band). Assembled here for the first time are 168 photographs of Tibetan militia and regular soldiers, drawn from twenty-six museums, public and private archives in Europe, North America and Asia, and taken by thirty-five different photographers. This produces a variety of visual discourses on the Tibetan army that is rarely seen with other topics and helps to reposition the Tibetan army at the centre of the enquiry, as seen under a number of spotlights. The volume shows how the Tibetan soldiers (both militia and regular troops) became progressively more visible in photographs during this period of time and how the various changes in the material culture and external appearance of the regular troops mirror the evolution of Tibet’s internal and international politics.

Mots clés: Tibet; history of Tibet; military history; Tibetan army; soldiers; flags; uniforms; insignia; emblems; army band; buddhism

Domaines: Histoire

Alice Travers. Marching into View: The Tibetan Army in Historic Photographs 1895–1959. Tethys, 5, 2022, Wissenschaft, 978-3-942527-14-9. ⟨10.36201/TETHYS.SCIENCE.5⟩. ⟨hal-03716900⟩