Tip: They, the ancestors of the Tibetan people, who lived on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the highest altitude in the world, established a powerful Tufan Dynasty, but why did they not invade India and often harass the Tang Dynasty? The answer is actually very simple, in addition to geographical and climatic factors, they themselves are a heroic people who love peace, only want to care for their own survival territory and homeland, and do not like to invade foreign regions, and the harassment of the Tang Dynasty is a wall of brothers.
Tubo (pronounced tǔ bō) (618-842 AD, Tibetan: BŚrīn) was a regime established by the ancient Tibetans on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, lasting more than two hundred years from Nangri to Langdarma.
The Tubo Dynasty was the first clearly documented regime in Tibetan history, and Songtsen Gampo is considered the de facto founder of the state. Under the unification of the Tubo Dynasty, the various departments of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau condensed into powerful forces and gradually stepped out of the closed inland plateau, making the ancient Tibetan society appear vigorous for the first time. The situation of fragmented, scattered and isolated development has been changed, and through the construction of institutions, laws, post stations, etc., the various small state regimes and tribal alliances have been integrated. Due to the internal population flow, the scope of social interaction has expanded, which has promoted mutual communication between the Tibetan language and the entire cultural level, and realized the cultural integration and growth of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. (Cai Rang, "Manuscript of the History of Tubo: History", Gansu People's Publishing House, People's Publishing House, 2010)
Tibetan social production is mainly based on agriculture and animal husbandry. Crops include barley, wheat, buckwheat, etc.; livestock include yaks, horses, camels, sheep, etc.; handicrafts include charcoal burning, iron smelting, rubber making, wool weaving, etc. The inscriptions, wooden tablets, documents, scriptures, etc. of the Tubo period have been preserved in large quantities to this day, and they are valuable materials for studying the society and history of Tubo. After the collapse of the Tubo Dynasty, the Han Chinese historical texts of the Song Dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty and the early years of the Ming Dynasty still refer to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the local people as "Tubo" or "Xifan".
The word Tubo first appeared in the Tang Dynasty Han Chinese historical texts. 蕃, the Tibetan word for "bod", is the ancient Tibetan self-designation. According to the more common theory, 蕃 is derived from the sound of the ancient Tibetan primitive religion, "bon"; others believe that 蕃 means agriculture, as opposed to Zhuo (bro, pastoral). Tu, which most people believe to be the transliteration of the Chinese "big", is a transliteration of Tubo calling itself "Dabo" to the Tang Dynasty; it is also interpreted as a transliteration of the Tibetan word "lho" (meaning Shannan, the birthplace of the Tubo royal family) or "stod" (meaning upper part, that is, western).
Regarding the origin of the Tubo nation, according to the 14th-century "Mingjian of the Lineage of The King", it is the earliest human beings born of the combination of macaque monkeys and rock witches, and their descendants multiplied, reclaiming flat land and building cities in various parts of present-day Tibet. It was not until Nie Chi Zampu, the first generation of the Tubo royal lineage, that zampu (king) descended from heaven that there was a distinction between kings and subjects. Zedang (Tibetan, meaning flat land for play) is said to be the place where macaques and their children play, and on the hills near Zedang, there is also a monument called "Monkey Cave". This legend of "macaques turning into people" reflects the authenticity of historical development to a certain extent, and is also the universal view of the ancient Tibetan people on the origin of their own ethnic groups.
The ancient Qiang people moved west to form the theory of Tubo, which originated from the ancient Han Chinese historical books. The New Book of Tang cites historical texts since the Book of the Later Han Dynasty, arguing that "the Tubo BenXi Qiang genus has fifty species of Gaibai, scattered between rivers, huang, jiang, and min.". In the Western Qiang tribes, the Fa Qiang and Tang Xu lived in the west of the Zhishui River as early as the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, and their land was far from the Central Plains, and there was little contact. Analyze the branches and make a branch. The name of the ancient Xirong state is in the Yellow River Basin of present-day Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and Guoluo Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province.
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has been inhabited by humans since ancient times, which overturns the traditional concept that the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is cold, the wilderness is thousands of miles, and no one will inhabit and reproduce in ancient times. In 2019, the team of academician Chen Fahu of the environmental archaeology team of Lanzhou University found a fossil of the right mandible of denisovans about 12 centimeters long found in the Baishiya Cave in Xiahe, Gansu Province, and found that humans had landed on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau 160,000 years ago. The results, released on May 2 of that year, pushed the time of human activity on the Tibetan Plateau from 40,000 years ago to 160,000 years ago.
The Denisovans are a human population that lived in the last ice age and belong to a whole new human population. Today's Tibetans carry a small number of fragments of Denisovan genes, which mostly have the innate ability to adapt to plateaus. Xiahe County is a county under the jurisdiction of Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu Province, named after the Daxia River in its territory. The Daxia River is a first-class tributary of the Yellow River, known as Lishui in ancient times, called "Sangqu" in Tibetan, and originates from the northern and southern foothills of the Great Burkhka Mountains at the junction of Gannan Andqing on the Gannan Plateau. This shows the experience of human beings from the territory of present-day Gansu along the Yellow River and conquering the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
A large number of archaeological excavations have also proved that as early as the Paleolithic Age, there have been human beings in Tibet, and in the past 20 years, Paleolithic tools have been found in Dingri, Shenza and other places. Since 1958, ancient human skulls and associated stone tools and pottery have been discovered in Nyingchi, Tibet. After scientific identification, the "Nyingchi people" are human remains of the Neolithic or golden stone combination period, belonging to the Mongolian race, that is, the yellow race, and are the ancestors of the modern Group A Tibetans.
From 1978 to 1979, the Neolithic site of Qamdo Karo in Tibet unearthed the ruins of many houses and a large number of stone tools, as well as bone tools, pottery, corn, animal bones, etc. According to radiocarbon determination, the early Karo site is 4655 years from the date of determination (1981) and the late date is 3930 years from the date of measurement. At that time, the people who lived here lived a settled life mainly in agriculture, combined with hunting and animal husbandry, rough textiles, the ability to make faience pottery, and ornaments made of bones, stones, and shells. That is to say, no later than 4,000 years ago, 2,700 years before the establishment of the slave Tubo Dynasty, the ancestors of the Tibetan people had already created a diversified and distinctive material culture in the present-day Tibet region.
The Kingdom of Zhang-Zhung was a tribal state that preceded Tibet on the dominant side of the Tibetan plateau. Zhangxiong is a Chinese character written according to the transliteration of the tibetan word "Zhangxiong", which has communicated with Central Asia, West Asia, South Asia and other regions. According to historical records, during the Eighteen Kingdoms of Zhangxiong, "the upper singlings were honorable, and the kings below were mighty..." It can be seen from this that the social status of the Yongzhong Bon Sect in the Zhang-zhung Kingdom was very high.
Many of the customs and lifestyles of tibetans today are also handed down in the Zhangxiong era, such as turning the sacred mountain, worshiping the god lake, planting wind and horse flags, planting colorful prayer flags, carving stone scriptures, placing mani piles, playing gua, and fortune telling, all of which have the shadow of Bon religious relics. The origin of the Tibetan script is also inseparable from the Zhang-zhung civilization. The Tibetan language originated in the Zhang-zhung script, and when Songtsen Gampo sent his minister Tunmi Sangbuza to create the Tibetan language, it can only be called an improvement of the Zhang-zhung script at most.
Chinese scholars in the later period of history called Zhangxiong "Yang Tong", which is a Chinese character written according to the transliteration of the two characters of "Zhangxiong" in Tibetan. The Ming Jian of the Lineage of Wang Tong and the Records of the King of Tibet compiled by Sonam Gyaltsen record that the Kingdom of Zhangxiong is located on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China. The central area of the territory was located in the present-day Ali region. Zaton Ngawang Kelsang Dan Begyenzan's Compendium of World Geography gives Zhang-zhung a rough geographical outline: the westernmost point is the Great and Small Buru (Gilgit), which is present-day Kashmir. From Buru to the southeast along the Himalayas, it included a small part of present-day India and Nepal. It is bordered to the north by Onion Ridge and Hotan, including Changtang. But the eastern boundary is less clear. If, according to Buddhist literature, the eastern side was limited to bordering Tubo and Su, then Zhang-zhung's territory did not include the Dokang region.
After the rise of Tubo, Zhangxiong gradually declined, and its last king, Li Mixia, married Songtsen Gampo's sister Zammun Saimaga as a concubine, so the two sides were initially allied. However, due to the strength of Tibet, the relations between the two sides have deteriorated more and more. In the end, in Songtsan Gampo, on the pretext of Zanmun SaiMaga's fall from favor, he led a large army to attack Yangtong in 642, which took three years to defeat Yangtong, and sent Qiongbo Bangse as the governor of Zhangxiong. Zhangxiong thus became a vassal state of Tibet. That is to say, the Tubo Dynasty not only inherited and improved the culture and writing of Zhangxiong, but also owned all the territory of Zhangxiong.
Tubo rose during the Songtsen Gampo period, moved its capital from the city of Pibo in Shannan (present-day Qiongjie County, Tibet) to Luo (一作逻娑, in present-day Lhasa, Tibet), annexed subi (present-day Qinghai-Tibet Plateau), Yangtong (present-day Qinghai-Tibet Plateau) and other departments, broke the Dangxiang and Bailan, defeated Tuguhun, took its old land, and conquered the great and small Buru in present-day Kashmir (located south of the Karakoram Mountains and northwestern part of the Himalayas) to the west, and took Nibora (present-day Nepal) and other places to the south, unifying the Qinghai-Tibet and Kang-Tibet Plateaus.
In the middle and late 8th century, the Tang Dynasty successively broke out the Anshi Rebellion, the Zhu Zhu Rebellion, the Disaster of Fanzhen and other civil unrest, Tubo took the opportunity to expand eastward and northward, and achieved Longyou and Hexi, and in 790 AD, Tubo occupied Beiting and Anxi. From the end of the 8th century to the beginning of the 9th century, the territory of Tibet reached its peak, bordering the Green Ridge (present-day Pamir Plateau) and the Great Eclipse (that is, the Arab Empire that arose in southwest Asia) in the west, the Pamir Plateau and the Indus River Basin in the east, the Western Rim of the Sichuan Basin in the east, the Tianshan Mountains in the north and the Juyan Sea, and the southern foothills of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the south and the Himalayas (more than 8,000 meters above sea level) and Tianzhu (present-day South Asian subcontinent) in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent.
In the face of these historical records, our question arises: Why did the powerful Tibet always harass the Tang Dynasty and not invade India? There are three main reasons for this: 1. the problem of climate and region; 2. the problem of national strength; 3. the problem of national blood and kinship and habits.
1. Climate and regional issues. During the lifetime of Songtsen Gampo, the Tang dynasty maintained peaceful and friendly relations, and the exchange of envoys between the two sides increased year by year. According to incomplete statistics, from the fourth year of Zhenguan (630) to 842, the two sides had a total of 191 exchanges, of which 66 were Tang officials and 125 were Envoys to Tang. At the same time, Tubo continued to send people to learn the advanced culture and etiquette of the Tang Dynasty, and most of these people returned to Tubo after completing their studies.
However, when it came to Tianzhu, it was different, according to the literature, the Tubo Dynasty had sent people to Tianzhu to study in the early days, and of the 16 Tibetan youths who could be sent, only Tunmi Sangbuza returned to Tubo after completing his studies, and the rest of the young talents all died because they were difficult to adapt to the humid and hot climate. It was too hot there, and the Tubo people didn't fit in. In addition to this, there is also a point that because of long-term living in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the air oxygen content is small, to the lower altitude, there will be symptoms of inadaptability, modern medicine will call this "drunken oxygen", people often appear sleepy.
The above is a climate problem, the regional problem is actually very simple, that is, in China's Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Loess Plateau, Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau is actually connected together, the climate in these places is not too hot, the altitude is not very high, Tubo people are relatively easy to adapt. Although the Tarim Basin is in the direction of Xinjiang, it also has the transition and connection of the Pamir Plateau. Similarly, in the face of Tianzhu, the Tubo people's area of activity was basically limited to places such as present-day Nepal and Bhutan, and it was difficult for them to adapt to the Ganges Plain further south of the Himalayas.
The fact is that Tianzhu and Tubo are bounded by the north bank of the Ganges River. In 648, the Tang envoy Wang Xuance was ordered to send an envoy to Tianzhu, just when there was a war in Tianzhu, the Tang envoys were robbed, Wang Xuance fled to Tubo, Songzan Gampo sent troops to help, and recruited troops in Nepal, led by Wang Xuance to Tianzhu, to quell the war, so that the Tang envoys returned smoothly and were taken prisoner in Chang'an. The New Book of Tang and the Tale of the Western Regions records that for this reason, Tubo once erected an iron monument on the bank of the Ganges River to determine tubo's "southern boundary here".
2. The question of national strength. Although Tubo unified the Qinghai-Tibet and Kang-Tibet Plateaus, as far as natural conditions are concerned, the living materials in these areas are relatively scarce, which to a large extent determines the poverty and backwardness of Tubo. There is grain and horses, but the number is too limited, which determines that the ability of the Tubo army to expand outward is limited, or that the strength of the Tubo state is actually very weak, coupled with the adaptation to the living environment of the plateau, there is basically no possibility of expansion to the plains or low-altitude areas.
3. Ethnic kinship and kinship and habits. Let's start with Nepal. Nepal was called Nipolo, Nipo, Mud Borneo. Popular belief in Buddhism. Since the fourth century, it has been in close cultural and economic ties with our country, and in 1791 it was also attached to the Qing Dynasty. Bhutan has been a tribe of Tibet since the 8th century, and Bhutan is an independent tribe in the 9th century. Both are heavily influenced by Tibetan culture. Therefore, no matter how the Ancestors of the Tibetan Nationality have national blood and kinship with the two in any case, there is no problem of intrusion. Although these two places belong to ancient India, that is, the South Asian subcontinent, from a geographical point of view, they also belong to the scope of activity of the Tibetan ancestors.
Tubo harassed the Tang Dynasty only in the surrounding areas of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, simply because there used to be a large number of Qiang people living in these places. The Qiang people and the Tubo people have a certain blood relationship, and the Tubo people's harassment of the Tang Dynasty is clearly to "integrate those Qiang people into one family". The idea is simple and makes sense from an emotional point of view.
Early Tibetan myths and legends believe that Tibetans originated in the East, in the neighboring areas of present-day Sichuan, Tibet, and Qinghai. The historical records of Tibet also mention the blood relationship between the ancient Qiang people and the Tibetan Mibokon clan. Therefore, there are views that Tibetans originated from the ancient Qiang people, that is, "Sino-Tibetan homology". Therefore, people today can not be harassed in terms of harassment, Tang and Tubo shi and shi war for more than 200 years, because of the "Sino-Tibetan homogeneity", all wars during this period can be called brothers and sisters.
Through all this, it is not difficult to see this national habit of Tubo - a nation that can survive on the plateau and can be called a heroic nation - the heroic Tubo nation is peace-loving from the bottom of its heart, has no more conditions, and does not want or willing to expand outward on a large scale. Therefore, there is no question of being able to invade ancient India.
(This article is based on relevant information, the picture comes from the network, part of the Zhangxiong, Guge ruins, thanks to the original author)
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