To Make a Monastery: Tibetan Settlement and Place-making on the Amdo Grasslands

In this paper, I examine how Tibetan nomadic pastoralists in the nineteenth century settled the grasslands surrounding Lake Tsongön in Amdo,[1] built their own permanent monasteries, established relationships with territorial deities, and affiliated their monasteries with larger monasteries in farming regions. I argue that these processes constituted a form of Buddhist place-making.

Some historical background is necessary before outlining the Buddhist place-making these Tibetan communities practiced in the late nineteenth century. Prior to this time, very few monasteries were built on the Lake Tsongön grasslands, yet many different pastoralist groups entered the region and incorporated or displaced other groups. For example, in the late seventh century, the Tibetan empire conquered the area before fracturing into a myriad of polities. Subsequently, waves of different Mongol polities conquered and established themselves in these grasslands. The last of these groups were the Khoshud Mongols, led by Gushri Khan, who conquered this region and all of Tibet in the seventeenth century. Many Tibetan communities were incorporated as subjects of the Khoshud rulers, while others fled southward.

In 1723-1724, the Khoshud and the Qing Dynasty (1636-1911) fought a war in which the Qing prevailed and reorganized the Khoshud Mongols into political units called banners to facilitate indirect rule and ensure they would not pose a future threat. From the Qing perspective, these grasslands were strategically located between Tibet, Dzungharia, and China, yet they were also marginal and ill-suited for agriculture, so indirect rule was desirable. Qing officials recognized that the Khoshud Mongols derived much of their power from their Tibetan subjects, whom the Qing referred to as “barbarians” (Ch. fan). The Qing attempted to separate the Tibetans from the Mongol banners and ostensibly incorporated them as Qing subjects. However, throughout the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the grasslands around Lake Tsongön were wracked by violence as Tibetan pastoralist communities raided livestock from the Mongol banners. These raids posed serious challenges to Qing rule as the Tibetan communities had reportedly “turned toward civilization” and become Qing subjects. Instead, these “barbarian bandits” (Ch. fanzei) destabilized the post-1724 political order. The crisis escalated from the late eighteenth century onward, and in the nineteenth century the Qing officials sent in troops on several occasions to drive them out of the Tsongön grasslands.[2] Thousands of refugees from the banners poured eastward into towns in farming regions under Qing control in the early nineteenth century. In the 1820s, an economic blockade was imposed on the Tibetan communities in an effort to weaken them by hunger and prevent further raiding.

By the late 1850s, however, the Qing Dynasty became increasingly preoccupied with natural disasters, internal rebellions, and the Second Opium War, and keeping Tibetans out of the Mongol banner lands no longer remained a priority. In 1858, Qing officials granted Tibetan communities the right to reside in the grasslands surrounding Lake Tsongön. Within a few decades of recognition, these nomadic Tibetan communities engaged in a form of Buddhist place-making by building their own monasteries. Previous scholarship has examined the growth of monasteries across the region with a focus on the affiliated Buddhist school,[3] and I build on this work by centering the Tibetan communities who supported monastery construction. To date, there has been little research on the founding of monasteries by newly settled communities, yet their histories are critical for understanding Buddhist place-making. We observe this clearly in place names. The monasteries that the communities constructed and the regions they settled often took on their name. For example, after the Kangtsa (Tib. Rkang tsha) community settled in the pastures north of Lake Tsongön, they founded the monastery of Kangtsa Gönchen, and the region became known as Kangtsa, persisting to this day in official political geography as Kangtsa County (Ch. Gangcha xian). These communities also sought the support of established monasteries and high lamas in eastern Amdo to oversee their monastery’s foundation and to affiliate them as “branch” (Tib. dgon lag) monasteries. These affiliations brought the communities into religious teaching networks, pilgrimage circuits, trade networks, and political alliances with eastern Amdo monasteries. For example, the Kangtsa established close relations with Ditsha monastery and the Fourth Amdo Zhamar. Kangtsa therefore became part of this lama’s mandala of activity.

Furthermore, the monasteries also formed networks between the nomadic communities, which formed reciprocal relationships with one another as patron communities (Tib. lha sde) of their monastery. Communities were expected to offer material support and children to become monks. In turn, monasteries were expected to provide religious services, be a source of virtue and welfare for the community, take in children as monks, and provide mediation during grassland disputes. Disparate communities were also linked together through their relationship with a monastery, for example, when they were called on to offer support for religious festivals or defend the monastery in times of crisis. Importantly, the monasteries provided the religious specialists who pacified the territorial deities on the grasslands, harkening back to Padmasambhava’s pacification of Tibet’s local deities through the construction of temples in the eighth century. These local deities usually live in mountains, and if communities maintain good relationships with them, they ensure good weather, health, and prevent natural disasters. All of these processes and the networks formed with larger monasteries constituted a form of Buddhist place-making.

[1] Lake Tsongön (Tibetan: Mtsho sngon; Mongolian: Kökenuur; Chinese: Qinghai hu) is a large lake in present-day Qinghai Province in northwest China. The Lake Tsongön region is usually considered to be part of larger Tibetan region called Amdo (Tib. A mdo) that comprises parts of present-day Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan provinces.

[2] For more on these conflicts, see Max Oidtmann, “Overlapping Empires: Religion, Politics, and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Qinghai,” Late Imperial China 37, no. 2 (2016): 41–91.

[3] Gray Tuttle, “Building up the Dge Lugs Pa Base in A Mdo: The Role of Lhasa, Beijing and Local Agency,” Zangxue Xuekan 7 (2012): 126–40; Brenton Sullivan, Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).