(TibetanReview.net, Oct23’19) – Despite having the territory under tight military control with nary a national government questioning its sovereignty over it, China continues to be obsessed to “prove” that Tibet was historically part of it. The latest is an over-five-year long painstaking “research” to prove in a 12-volume compilation of “selected” materials dating from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) that Tibet belongs it.
The Selected Archives, which are in Tibetan, Mongolian and Manchu languages at the Archives of Tibet Autonomous Region, have been published with a release ceremony held Oct 22 in Tibet’s capital Lhasa, reported China’s official Xinhua news agency Oct 22.
The report described the 12 volumes as the first to systematically record the photocopies of thousands of important Mongolian and Manchu archives since the Yuan Dynasty of Mongol rule over China.
The report said the archives reflected the relationship between the “central government” and the “local government of Tibet” in Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and the history of exchanges between Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan and other ethnic groups during that time.
The report continued that a total of 1,394 documents were presented in the books, including imperial edicts from the Yuan and Qing dynasties, as well as documents of the Dalai Lama and “local officials” in Tibet.
Tibet’s erstwhile temporal and still spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has always maintained that Tibet was historically an independent country, including by citing Chinese scholars with knowledge of imperial archives. The Central Tibetan Administration at Dharamsala, India, has also brought out a number of publications over the years designed to assert this point.
