Lucette Boulnois was one of the most important scholars of Tibetan economic history. Her 1983 Poudre d’or et monnaies d’argent au Tibet (principalement au 18ème siècle) [Gold Dust and Silver Coins of Tibet (Mainly in the 18th Century)] is one of the earliest, still among the most important, and unfortunately one of the least cited monographs on the subject. She examined Western-, Nepalese-, and Chinese-language sources to paint a picture of the importance of precious metals to Tibet’s economy as well as its engagement with the rest of Asia. This article describes the previous (seventeenth) century and demonstrates, against the usual image of Tibet, that trade and commerce were supported by the Tibetan government, included the active participation of monks, and were quite international in scope, with nearly one hundred commercial firms in Lhasa. The rulers of the Kathmandu Valley were to play a key role in the Tibetan economy, in the process invading Tibet five times over two centuries. She also shows that the rise of the Gelukpa establishment was linked to and benefited from the stability that came with Mongol and later Manchu involvement in Central Tibet. Finally, she places the Tibetan economy in the context of international trade, with which it was intimately linked.
Lhasa, city of golden temples and prostrating pilgrims, “Lassa or Barantola, Residence of the Great Lama” as the maps of the time show, was not only a holy city and a political capital; it was also a great center for commercial trade which focused on it dreams that were material as well as secular.
Tibet already had the reputation of being a country of commerce and merchants, where the government favored trade, where every traveler or pilgrim brought something to sell, where everyone had the right to buy and sell without either shop or license (everyone except, in principle, the monks, but this rule could be circumvented).
Trade—the country was, in any case, unable to do without it; the lack of certain commodities required it. Internal trade between farmers and nomadic stockbreeders, external trade with neighboring countries, was a necessity. Tibet had, still has, unbalanced economic resources: it lacked commodities of prime necessity, foodstuffs, products of the textile and metallurgical industries; it had, on the other hand, in abundance and beyond its own needs, products desired abroad. Some of them fed a major and far-reaching commercial trade, an important source of enrichment; the commodities of primary necessity were the object of trade of survival and proximity.
These different types of trade existed for centuries. Contrary to our current notion of a country closed, forbidden, isolated, and therefore mysterious, Tibet, in the seventeenth century and especially in the second half of the century, offers the image of a country open to foreign merchants and missionaries. At least this is what can be deduced from the contemporary Indian, Nepalese, Chinese, Armenian and Western accounts that have come down to us, testifying to the vitality of trade and the diversity of travelers who reached Lhasa at that time.
WITH GREAT RISK AND DIFFICULTY: GOD SAVE THE TRAVELER!
Communications were difficult, however, in the first place because of geographical obstacles: the cold, snow and altitude of this fortress-plateau surrounded by the highest mountains in the world—the Himalayas, Kunlun, Hengduan, where even the passes lie at more than 5,000 meters—a plateau blocked in its interior by other mountain ranges; salt marshes to the north-west, considerable distances to travel, vast regions almost uninhabited or infested by bandits, deserts without pasture. Added to this, for those who came from overseas, were the risks of storms, pirates, dead calm, deadly reefs and other perils of the sea, before reaching the terra firma of India. From all these voyages, on both land and sea, one did not always return; besides murder, drowning and other violent deaths, exhaustion and disease overcame many travelers, merchants or missionaries, pilgrims or sailors. Further on, we will see the risks to profits and of material losses, plundered caravans, goods lost or seized, travel costs and delays en route.
THE POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF TRADE
The free flow of commercial movements depended however on the political situation, a factor more powerful than snow and bandits. During the seventeenth century, the political situation was often troubled in Tibet; a long period of politico-religious conflict mirrors the struggle for ascendancy between different groups, religious orders, monasteries, princely families: Gelukpa against Karma Kagyüpa, the “kingdom” of Ü (Lhasa) against the “kingdom” of Tsang (Zhigatsé). And especially, the turbulence that shook the Mongol world affected the political and religious situation of Tibet (or rather, before 1642, of the different Tibets), through the game of alliances and wars involving eastern and western Mongols, Manchus in rampant expansion—Ming China until 1644, then Manchu China (Qing). One can imagine that in periods of open war, commercial trade was sometimes interrupted, diverted or limited; but to recover immediately, or link up in another way. On the other hand, external trade was also conditioned by the evolution of Mogul India and the establishment in India of Western maritime and mercantile powers: after the decline of the Portuguese, the seventeenth century saw the rapid expansion of the Dutch and the British.
The trade of survival—which included various types of barter, such as grain for salt, salt for tea, tea for butter—was widely prevalent inside the country. Moreover, a system of trading grain for salt seems to have existed for centuries on the borders of the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayan valleys of India, Nepal, Bhutan, all along the Himalayas. This system, which could still be observed in the 1960s, is based on the lack of salt within the land-locked Himalayan populations. On the other hand, the high Tibetan plateau is rich in deposits—especially lake deposits—of food salt. As for the Tibetans, they lack grain, fruits and vegetables. This system of barter supported a precarious regional economy and brought about a circulation of goods almost independent, locally, of the great political disturbances of the kingdoms, even though part of the grain likely contributed to feeding Lhasa. The great import-export trade between nations is a completely different story.
The importance of trade with Tibet for all the surrounding countries is reflected in the military episodes, international treaties and rivalries between kingdoms, to take over the trade routes to Lhasa, to obtain certain privileges and monopolies, one country supplanting another. An apparently dull form of war, but war all the same, and sometimes open war, large-scale trade is the field of action for the great predators.
In Asia, the sixteenth century had been the century of the Portuguese, of the transfer through their hands, by way of Indian and Indonesian ports, of a good part of the wealth in spices, gold, indigo, cotton fabrics and silks; of a slide towards the Indian ports of the commercial overland flow across Asia, somewhat devitalizing the routes that were called (later) the “Silk Route.” But from the beginning of the seventeenth century Portuguese power began to decline. Other predators were arriving: the Netherlands and England. The “East Indies Companies,” trading companies with shareholders and monopolies, supported by their governments, are successively created: in 1601 the British East India Company, in 1602 the Dutch V. O. C. (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie); the French Compagnie des Indes only in 1664. Little by little, with difficulty but effectively, the Dutch and British forced the Portuguese from all their strongholds in India and Indonesia (Goa essentially remained theirs) and set themselves up triumphantly in the mercantile channels; they all had their “factories” in the great cities and ports, particularly in Surat, on the west coast of India, in Gujarat, then a Mogul province. Surat, which was until the end of the seventeenth century the principal port in India, “the source and life of all the trade of the East Indies” according to one traveler of the time; Surat, where Gujarati, Mogul, Persian, Arab, Armenian, Jewish, central Asian Turkic, British and Dutch and, later and briefly, French, merchants all flocked. The products of all the West, the Middle East, Indonesia, China and all of India were traded there. The products ending up in Tibet or coming from there passed through Surat.
Trade with the West was a source of enrichment for the Mogul Empire. And the Moguls lent a hand to the process. This set of circumstances constituted new breath: it is not by chance that this same period saw trans-Himalayan trade with Tibet expand, a currency appear in Tibet, and Lhasa filled with foreign merchants.
THE APPEARANCE OF CURRENCY IN TIBET
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, central Tibet, which until then had not used metal coins and would have known, it is said, only barter in kind, began to make use of silver coinage. This currency was not made in Tibet by the Tibetans but, curiously enough, came to them from the south, from Nepal: in a way, they bought their currency, not being able, for religious reasons, it is said, to make it themselves.
In Nepal, the Newar kings of the Malla dynasty who reigned over the Kathmandu Valley had themselves begun making silver currency only after 1565; until then they had contented themselves with copper coins. This monetary evolution, realized after agreement with the Mogul emperor, marks at the same time an economic boom and an intensification of trade in these regions.
Subsequently, King Mahendra Malla who had struck the first silver coinage, or one of his successors, concluded with the government of Lhasa an agreement according to which Tibet would henceforth be supplied with silver coinage by the king of Kathmandu, according to the following device: with silver ingots provided by the Tibetans, the Kathmandu mint would make half-rupee coins; these coins (very similar to the half-rupees made for Nepal) would then be returned to Tibet, the Nepalese taking, in the process, a profit obtained in part in replacing a small proportion of the silver in the coins by the same weight of copper. This strange contract ended in 1792, following the serious problems in the eighteenth century, but functioned perfectly well, it seems, during the second half of the seventeenth century.
These coins were used in central Tibet: Lhasa, Zhigatsé, Gyantsé, the richest districts, the most populated, the ones closest to southern influences. They were never used outside Tibet. Considering the value of silver at this time, the fact that there was no smaller denomination than this half-rupee coin (however, people broke these coins into pieces to obtain smaller denominations), it can be assumed that this silver currency was not suitable for small day-to-day expenditures by the population, which, undoubtedly—not having copper coins at their disposal either—still practiced barter in kind for small-value trade.
It seems that this contract had been imposed on the Tibetans; a number of factors enabled the Nepalese to put pressure on them: the desire the Tibetans might have had to profit from the increased development of trade with Mogul India, mutual need, Tibet’s military weakness at the time in question. We will see further on how this device was, if not imposed, at least re-imposed and confirmed about 1643.
TRANS-HIMALAYAN TRADE: THE NEPALESE ROUTE
Over the course of the seventeenth century, Tibet-Nepal trade was going to burgeon more than ever, benefiting from two politico-economic circumstances: first, from 1642—when the Fifth Dalai Lama was established in Lhasa as political and religious sovereign of a large, more or less unified Tibetan state extending from Kham to the borders of Ladakh—the development of Lhasa as administrative, religious and commercial capital, giving rise to the influx of aristocratic families, the concentration of craftsmen and artists for the construction of religious and civil buildings, the appearance, all in all, of a richer clientele; second, a period of prosperity for the Mogul empire and active trade with countries overseas. This commercial boom, which drew the flow of goods in towards the big Mogul cities, was to make the fortune of, among others, the Malla kingdoms of the Kathmandu Valley in the role of forwarding agents where they succeeded in imposing themselves between Tibet and its southern trading partners: India and the West.
This trade to the south had as centers, in Tibet, mainly Lhasa and Zhigatsé. Via the double Nepalese route Kuti–Kathmandu and Kyirong–Kathmandu, crossing the Himalayan range fairly easily, goods coming from central Tibet were sent in large part to Patna, in Mogul India. The Nepalese route was the most convenient, the least difficult, the most sure. Infinitely more difficult was the route between Lhasa and Kashmir via the western Tibetan plateau; moreover, Ladakh, worried about Mogul policies, closed its borders from about 1643 to 1664, which contributed even more to the diverting of the flow of trade to the Nepalese route; as for the journey via Bhutan, it would have been shorter and fairly practical if it had not been closed politically. Therefore, large-scale trade, for these reasons, already preferred the Nepalese route.
Between Tibet and Nepal, religious, political and economic relations are ancient. From the seventh century A.D. at least, when the major routes to central Tibet by way of Kuti and Kyirong were frequented by merchants, pilgrims and Buddhist missionaries. Commercial relations flourished with the setting up of Newar shopkeepers and craftsmen in Lhasa and Zhigatsé. Ambiguous relations, dictated by geography, embellished by religion and threatened by conflicts of vested interests, imposed by force, periodically exploding into wars and invasions, but always resumed.
Since 1967, a year-round (at least theoretically) road suitable for motor vehicles, built by Chinese engineers, allows travel from Kathmandu to Lhasa in twenty-nine hours by bus, spread over three or four days. Before that, the route unfolded to the rhythm of pack animals and human feet. For example, Ippolito Desideri left Lhasa on 28 April 1721 and arrived in Kuti, then a border town, on 30 May: that is to say, a month on the road. Not wanting to face the Nepalese hot season, he stayed in Kuti for six and a half months; setting off again on 14 December, he passed Nesti (the old frontier) two or three days later and arrived in the Kathmandu Valley on 27 December: thirteen days plus thirty-two days, that is to say, forty-five days, if one did not stop, between Lhasa and Kathmandu. Two other missionaries, Johannes Grueber and Albert d’Orville, who made the same trip in 1662, state: four days from Lhasa to the foot of the first range, plus one month up to Kuti, plus five days from Kuti to Nesti, plus five days from Nesti to Kathmandu; total: forty-four days without stopping. These times represented a moderate pace, with horses in Tibet, on foot in Nepal. Heavily loaded trade caravans, those that used yaks for pack animals, could be slower. One could, moreover, be forced to stop here or there for a few days. It was necessary as well to take the seasons into account: one did not travel willingly in either the height of the monsoon in Nepal, or the depths of winter over the Himalayan passes. Further south, for the crossing of the plains, through forests infested with malaria, one would definitely avoid the summer. But in spite of all these obstacles, this route via Nepal remained the favorite of merchants and travelers.
At that time, to go from Kathmandu to the big trade centers of India, merchants had to cross a zone of moderately high mountains, then a low range, then the Terai—plains dangerous because of malaria; one then entered, via Gorrochepur (Gorakhpur) among others, Mogul territory; one ended up in Patna, whose wealth and commercial importance are described by many travelers; from there goods left again for Bengal, or Agra, Multan, Lahore, Kabul, or the ports of India’s western coast, and particularly Surat. Kabul was the emporium for the land routes to Balkh, “Great Tartary” and, in short, all of central Asia, as well as Kandahar and Isfahan.
The crossing of Nepal was made in great part using human porterage: the image still familiar today of the porter with his big basket—though the porter is sometimes a woman. In the southern plain one entered the Indian domain of the bullock cart. Bullock cart all the way to Surat; boats on the Ganges between Patna and Bengal, mules, horses, camels and carts to Kabul. But between the southern Nepalese Terai and Patna, it was necessary as well—like Desideri in his unhappy experience in 1722—to face forests haunted by tigers, the rapaciousness of extortionate local Mogul authorities, the peril of highwaymen, before reaching the safety of the big merchant city.
One of the reasons for the dominance of the Nepalese route is that the Newar kings of the Malla dynasty that ruled the whole of the Kathmandu Valley, mainly the kings of Kathmandu—despite the attempts of the neighboring Gurkha kingdom to take their place—succeeded in imposing themselves as exclusive middlemen between Lhasa and northern India on the two main routes, Kyirong–Kathmandu and Kuti–Kathmandu. For this, they resorted to the army and invasion—first, about 1630, and a second time about 1645–1650—and achieved their ends; that is to say, a treaty which conclusively established their privileges and monopolies. By the terms of this treaty, Newar merchants were authorized to set up thirty-two firms in Lhasa; a representative of the king of Kathmandu would be accredited in Lhasa to ensure the protection of their interests; Newar merchants engaged in trade with Tibet would be exempted from all taxes and customs duties; if they died in Tibet, their possessions would go back to Nepal and not to the Tibetan government; all trade from Tibet to India, even that conducted by non-Newar merchants, would be routed through the Kathmandu Valley and by no other route (such as Sikkim or Bhutan). The governments of the Dalai Lama and the Malla kings would jointly control the fortified towns of Kyirong and Kuti, which meant command of the two Lhasa– Kathmandu routes. Furthermore, Tibet would pay Nepal a symbolic amount in gold and silver, and finally, a major clause: Nepal would act as Tibet’s mint; Nepal would supply Tibet with silver coins and for that would use silver ingots provided by Tibet or would purchase silver with gold provided by Tibet. This monetary clause is perhaps only the reaffirmation at this point of a situation already in existence. What is certain is that from 1645, the Malla kings and the Newar merchants occupy a position of monopoly and have a stranglehold on Tibet–Nepal–India trade which they will hold on to for more than a century, and beyond the fall of the Malla kings. This situation seems to have been accepted by the Tibetans, who probably also found advantage in it.
But what, then, were these products so precious that, despite great difficulty and danger, made merchants come from the snowbound heart of Asia or from beyond the oceans?
PRODUCTS EXPORTED BY TIBET
In the seventeenth century Tibet was world famous for the following products: musk, gold, medicinal plants, yak tails, “shawl” wool, and a few other articles. All these rare and precious products are fully described in the accounts of merchants and missionaries, among the geographers and historians, in dictionaries and trade handbooks of the time, especially for the second half of the century.
Of these precious materials, surely the most famous, in the West, is musk. We know that this substance, used in medicine and making perfume in Europe and Asia (in Europe, today, medical usage has disappeared and its use in perfume-making is extremely reduced), is produced by a small quadruped resembling a fawn, the musk deer, whose scientific name is Moschus moschiferus. It haunts the wooded mountains of eastern Asia: the Himalayas, Tibet, Tonkin, Altai, Korea, Manchuria, Siberia. It has always been hunted for the profit to be derived from its musk pouch, a small outgrowth that only the males have, situated under the stomach, associated with the animal’s sexual activity. This small pouch, which weighs from twenty to thirty grams, is lined inside with glands that secrete a thick, oily, brown-red colored substance, giving off a very powerful odor: pure musk. The value of musk varies according to its region of origin, that from Siberia and Korea being less than that of the Himalayas. In the seventeenth century, the most sought after on the international market are the musks of Tibet and Tonkin, especially because of their greater purity, guaranteed by government controls; musk was often adulterated in various ways by dishonest vendors. The animal has been hunted for so many centuries that it is now protected as a species at risk of extinction; but at the time we are focused on, it seems that it was abundant.
European perfume-makers and doctors of the time used at least as much musk as their colleagues in Persia, China or the Indies; this is attested to by therapy treatises from that period. The uses of musk varied according to the medical systems in various countries, but they included use as a heart tonic, antispasmodic, and treatment for snake venom, to help in childbirth and to soothe small children, and for a great number of the most varied ailments. The French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who lived in India between 1638 and 1668, purchased in one particular year, at one time, 7,673 pouches, plus 452 ounces in bulk—that is to say, a total of more than 92 kilograms—from Tibetan merchants in the city of Patna, which seems to have been at the time, along with Kabul, one of the big markets for Asian musk. For this purchase he paid the equivalent of 14,357 French livres, or francs, of his time; but he writes that rather than being paid in gold or silver coin, the vendors much preferred to exchange the musk for coral and amber.
According to Tavernier, in order to maintain Tibet’s trade reputation, the “king” instituted an inspection of merchandise: musk pouches had to be presented open for inspection in Lhasa, so that the contents could be verified, because people often adulterated this substance, mixing in blood from the animal or its mashed flesh, or adding lead to increase the weight; after the inspection, the Tibetan government inspector sealed the pouches and they left for Nepal, India, the rest of the world, and also, of course, to Xining, of which we will speak further on.
From Patna, the musk could continue its way to Delhi, Agra, Surat; from there, putting out to sea bound for a port on the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, or directly to Europe by going around Africa; from the Red Sea, to the ports of Arabia and Alexandria. And from Kabul, via the overland routes, the musk was routed towards central Asia, to Kandahar, Isfahan, Tauris and the Mediterranean shores of the Middle East.
Tibet’s longest standing reputation in the economic sphere, apart from musk, was as a producer of gold. This reputation goes back, unbroken, to earliest antiquity, without doubt as far back as the time of Herodotus who, in the fifth century B.C., handed down to us a tradition of “ant’s gold” which still amuses and intrigues many researchers. Today, what is considered to be the most probable hypothesis for this is that specks of gold were to be found in the ground—in which an infinite number of marmots made their burrows—in then uninhabited regions located in present-day Ladakh. In throwing out the earth as they burrowed, these marmots brought to light particles of gold, which neighboring populations came to gather up. It was paid in tribute to the king of Persia.
Tibet’s gold-bearing reputation, in general, continued from century to century. It is, moreover, well-founded; but the importance of the production, and even more that of reserves, have undoubtedly been continually exaggerated. It is, nevertheless, a fact that for two thousand years and more, Tibet continually produced gold dust from successive sites. If, in the seventeenth century, stories of nuggets as big as a sheep’s liver and mountains peppered with gold, were already nothing more than legend, gold-washing and the working of shallow mines supplied the state treasury in the form of taxes, the growth of monastic wealth in the form of offerings, the growth of private wealth, the decoration and architecture of palaces and temples, and external trade. This was where Nepal obtained the gold that the Newar goldsmiths and statue makers used. It was not minted into coins, but left as Tibetan gold dust, held in small leather sacks containing a half-tola (about 5.8 grams) called “sarshu,” which were easily transported: gold was accepted everywhere.
From time to time (even today!) one sees the reappearance of some fantastic rumor attributing fabulous gold mines to Tibet: in the same way the two Jesuit missionaries who crossed Tibet and Nepal in 1662, Grueber and d’Orville, related (in China Illustrata, by Athanasius Kircher) that in the region of the town of Changur, capital of a kingdom occupying north-east Tibet, situated fifteen days’ travel from Lhasa, between Lhasa and Kokonor, were “fourteen gold mines, the quantity of which supplied all of India.” According to a personal communication from Ren Xinjian (Institute of History, Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences), the town of Changur is Dengke in the county of Dergé. Dengke is situated on the left (eastern) bank of the Yangzi River, in the province of Sichuan, about 98° E and 32° 30’ N. There certainly was gold in this area, but not so much as to supply all of India!
What could seriously attract foreign merchants, then, was not so much the quantities of gold that Tibet could supply, but the price at which it could supply it. Now, it seems that Tibetan gold was very cheap, on the spot, compared to what a non-producing country could buy from the Spanish, the Portuguese, in Africa and in India. The price ratio between gold and silver at the end of the century was of the order of 1 to 14, or 1 to 15 in the West (1 gram of gold being worth 14 to 15 grams of silver), 1 to 10 in China, and in Tibet it could go down to 1 to 10, 1 to 9 and even lower. There was, therefore, a good, attractive market there. Furthermore, unlike many countries, Tibet did not hinder the export of gold produced on its territory. The passage of gold through Nepal was the monopoly by the Malla kings. However, we know that Tibet also exported gold to Ladakh, and to Xining for the Chinese market, and that Armenian merchants purchased it in Lhasa and Xining to take back to India.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the “gold-bearing” rumor of Tibet reached the ears of Peter the Great, who dreamed of seizing “the Dalai Lama’s gold.” He did not have time to carry out his plan. There is, however, an edict from him from which it emerges that he had conceived a plan to send to Lhasa, on the pretense of engaging in trade, informants expert in mining. It was perhaps these “Muscovites,” supposed merchants, that Ippolito Desideri reported in Lhasa during his stay in the city from 1716 to 1721. But it is not known for how long they were there.
Another category of export from Tibet in the seventeenth century, was (and still is) medicinal plants and other materia medica. At that time, it was not a question, like today, of fritillary, Cordyceps sinensis or snow lotus, but rhubarb, wormseed (Artemisia, maritima), mamiron, zedoary, peonies and medicinal mallows. Every one knows medicinal rhubarb, which was consumed in large quantities in Europe; the most highly rated varieties were those from Tibet and Tartary; much of it passed through Patna and Kabul, marketed in the form of dried sections of roots and rhizomes; it was prescribed in Europe as a purgative, tonic agent, digestive and astringent; in Nepal, for snake bite and stomach trouble. From Tibet came, as well, worm-seed, an artemisia, a known anti-helminth remedy, also used, according to Tavernier, by the Persians, the British and the Dutch, in place of anise, in their sweets. An export from the southern Himalayan regions of Tibet, more especially around Dzongkha and Kirong, was zedoary, a word that seems to cover several non-poisonous aconites such as Aconitum heterophyllum, prescribed for snake bite, various digestive problems, the “fevers,” and as a tonic and antidote. Mamiron, which was used as a treatment for eye diseases, was also derived from a Tibetan plant. Medicinal animal products also made up part of Tibetan exports (they are still used in Chinese medicine): besides musk, already mentioned, leopard bone, bear bile, bezoars (internal concretions) from cows, newly grown stag horn, boiled and dried scorpion, all products that were plentiful in Kham at that time.
The trading of furs was much more important than today: there was little heating and for months travelers were exposed to severe temperatures. Tibet was abundant in martens; the snow leopard was not yet scarce; the fox and the wolf were abundant. In spite of the brake that Buddhism represents, Tibetans and Mongols of this period hunted a lot—with less skill than the Russians, claims Tavernier.
Among the oldest of Tibet’s export products, yak tails must also be mentioned, marketed across India under the name of “chowry” (Skr. chamara): superb white and black plumes, the strands of which can reach two meters in length. These tails served as fly swatters, but were also symbols of power, decorating standards or staffs of command in the Turkish, Indian and Chinese worlds. Later, there will be industrial uses for yak tails. There should be no mistake: this was not a gimmick, it was an item of export found on trading lists, from antiquity, all through the centuries.
So far we have listed the rare, precious or curious products that most attracted the attention of foreigners; more common, but perhaps equally profitable (we lack the figures) were the basic products of the Tibetan economy: those of its flocks and herds. Sheep, goats, yaks, hybrids of yak and cow, horses, mules, asses, camels (the latter in the north), a few pigs here and there, totaled millions of head. Further along we will touch on the products of the “shawl” goat, exported particularly to the West, and horses, exported to China. It seems that at that time Tibet exported a heavy yak-hair serge, raw sheep’s wool and woolen cloth. The accounts at our disposal do not mention a massive export of raw sheep’s wool as will be seen later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (today’s sheep breeds provide, in particular, carpet and blanket wool). On the other hand, they report products that seem to have disappeared from the country: a gray felt known as “silver and iron,” fine woolen cloth and “a very beautiful woolen cloth that resembles silk,” made in Tsetang in central Tibet. There seems to have been at that time a high-quality textile craft industry. Tibetan carpets are already mentioned as well.
That Tibet could have been a producer of silk is something that seems curious to us today; and yet, two witnesses present in Lhasa in 1720—an Italian missionary and a Chinese officer—each separately testify that Tibet was selling silkworm cocoons and Tibetan silk (the Chinese princess who was given in marriage to a king of Tibet in the seventh century, is she not supposed to have introduced sericulture to Tibet?). Desideri also mentions a wild silk, a “tree silk” produced on the borders of Bhutan and sold throughout the whole of Tibet. There is nothing surprising in that: Assam, which is not far from there, also produced a well-known wild silk.
One does not often see the production of borax mentioned. Borax or sodium borate, abundant in Tibetan lakes, was used in the past for metal soldering, and was an important object of trade in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, one finds articles mentioned for the seventeenth century that seem to have disappeared from Tibetan soil: iron from the region of Kuti, paper from Dakpo, lapis lazuli from Lhorong Dzong, turquoise from Chaya (Tibet was a modest producer and a big user and importer of turquoise); rock crystal from the Yarlung region seems to have lost its importance, although tourists see small pieces of it offered for sale. Also mentioned as products at the end of the seventeenth century are an incense paste made of various vegetable substances, used for religious fumigation, and bowls of veined wood, very much sought after.
TRANS-HIMALAYAN IMPORTS
But what did Tibet import from the south, in exchange for all the precious products—gold, musk—that went out?
Tibetans obtained food products from among their neighbors: grain from border trade; more grain from the Kathmandu Valley—at that time called the Nepal Valley—as well as sugar, chilies and various vegetable produce. They also imported food products from China, particularly tea. Having no factories for the production of metal goods, they also imported small agricultural implements, weapons (swords and knives, bullets, gun hammers), padlocks and locks; also mentioned are, at least for the very end of the seventeenth century, glass bottles, small mirrors, silk and cotton fabric, pieces of copper and copper objects, dying products like “manjit” or madder, which dyes red, odoriferous products for making incense, Kashmiri saffron. No less essential than the foodstuffs, the coins used in Tibet were, as we have seen, imported from Nepal.
Imports reported with the most insistence by Western merchants (no doubt because they concerned them more) are those of precious materials: Tibet was a buyer of amber, coral, turquoise, conches, pearls and precious and semi-precious stones, as well as articles made of gold and silver.
We know the importance of coral, turquoise and amber in the Tibetan civilization: necklaces, earrings and reliquaries are inlaid with coral and turquoise, and decorated with large amber beads; wealthy and highly placed people, lay and religious, have rosaries of coral, amber, pearls, rock crystal and lapis lazuli. Amber, coral and turquoise are almost part of everyone’s wardrobe, and statues in temples are profusely adorned with them.
All or nearly all the coral imported by the Tibetans came from the shores of the Mediterranean. In the seventeenth century, red coral, or pink, used in jewelry, was gathered mainly in nine Mediterranean fishing zones situated on the coasts of Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Catalonia and Majorca and on the Barbary Coast of Algeria and Tunisia. The coral was marketed most often in the form of grains or beads, polished in the workshops of Marseilles or Italy. They were made into necklaces, bracelets and rosaries. The largest pieces, which went to sculptors, became cameos, large brooches and statuettes. For the Eastern market, unpolished pieces were also shipped so that foreign artists could work them in their own way. It was customary in the West to set aside fine intact branches, which were rare, and give them as they were to kings and churches. This custom crossed the seas, since Desideri, in 1720, notes that the Tibetans, to whom blood sacrifices were repugnant, offered to their lamas and to their “idols,” on the altars, such things as lamps, Chinese silks, gold and silver, perfumes to burn, or “branches of coral and other curiosities.”
The crates of coral passed through Alexandria, the ports of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, Surat; from the coasts of the Mediterranean, they traveled to Persia—Isfahan, whence Armenian merchants took them to Kabul, Balkh, Agra, Patna, Leh, Lhasa, Xining. Why such infatuation, so lasting, so universal, for coral? The beauty, the color, the virtues attributed to it of protection against evil forces, demons, bad luck. It is, no doubt, about the first century A.D. that coral, via the routes and the flow of trade that developed then, found a place among the precious materials particularly prized in Buddhism.
Amber, as well, was (and still is) very much in demand in Tibet. It was extracted in Burma and China; but even more sought after was European amber, produced since antiquity in one sole coastal region of eastern Prussia, on the shores of the Baltic. Armenian merchants went to Danzig (Gdansk) for their supply to take back to Asia; they even took an order for the “king of Tibet.” According to Tavernier, four Armenians, after a trip to Tibet, went to Danzig “to have a quantity of yellow amber figures made, which represented all sorts of animals and monsters, that they were going to take to the King of Bhutan …” (Bhutan is one of the names by which Westerners referred to, at that time, not the Bhutan of today, but central Tibet). To their great regret, they were unable to find a large enough piece to fill one of the orders of the “king of Tibet”: “a figurine in the form of a monster, which has six horns, four ears, four arms with six fingers on each hand.” Tavernier is Christian, and Huguenot: his description of the “monster” reflects this; he deplores this lure of gain because “it is a vile business to supply instruments of idolatry to this poor people.” For him, these Armenians too easily come to terms with religion.
Amber sold then in Patna from 250 to 300 rupees for a good piece of nine French ounces (about 275 grams), while the same weight in small unpolished, unworked pieces went for only 35 to 40 rupees.
Tibet also imported conches—Buddhist symbol and musical instrument in the temples—gathered on the shores of India; as well, pearls from the Persian Gulf, turquoise from Persia, precious stones from India.
TIBET–LADAKH TRADE
The western Tibetan plateau is the habitat of a goat which, in this terribly cold climate, produces a downy under-coat that can be removed by carding, spun and made into an extraordinarily warm wool, fine and light. It has been known for centuries in the world by the name of “cashmere,” because it is mainly through the Kashmiri weavers and their famous shawls that it is widely known, originally, in Europe.
This wool was exported raw to Ladakh, whose capital, Leh, was a crossroads for caravans between Tibet, Kashmir and Yarkand; worried about Mogul designs, the king of Ladakh closed its borders in 1643, but in 1664 he fell subject to the Mogul empire. Then, after a politico-religious war with central Tibet, he was definitively forced, in 1684, by his Indian overlord and his Tibetan conqueror, to submit to a system that regulated the exploitation of “shawl” wool in favor of Kashmir: first, the province of Ngari, the western part of the Tibetan plateau, a big producer of this wool, became, definitively, a province under the authority of central Tibet, and its revenue would go to Lhasa; all the “shawl” wool would be sold to a single intermediary—the government of Ladakh. Ladakh could keep for itself only the production from the Rutok district, which its royal agents would come to get; all the rest would be resold exclusively, by perpetual monopoly, to Kashmir, through the intermediation of four authorized merchants. It is, in fact, for a long time, Kashmir which derived profit from this wonderful wool; it supplied the industry that made the famous shawls, put weavers, dyers and embroiderers to work, constituted a major component of the Kashmiri economy and filled Europe, Russia and northern India with these marvelous products. Here again, Tibet was selling its products raw, and others were growing rich; the same is true for the Ladakhis. Lack of labor force or know-how? Lack of interest? Or constraint?
The treaty of 1684 between Ladakh and Lhasa concerned not only wool but also a product which had become essential—tea. It came from China—then the sole producer—from Sichuan, on the other horizon of Tibet, by way of a route that passed through Lhasa. Any obstacle to the arrival of the caravans hit the Ladakhis at the heart of their way of life. The 1684 treaty stated that tea would continue to be supplied to Ladakh by Tibetan caravans, at the rate of 200 loads per year. If this meant yak-loads, from 90 to 100 kilograms, this represented 18 to 20 metric tons of tea.
Another clause established the regular dispatching every two years of a caravan departing Leh and carrying to Lhasa the “tribute” from the kingdom of Ladakh; and on return to Leh, the caravan brought tea. This tribute caravan, called the lapchak caravan, existed for almost three centuries.
It is understood that the crossing of Tibet from the west was not the route preferred by merchants. The trip from Leh to Lhasa, via Gartok, past Mount Kailash and over the Mayum pass, meant, first of all, three months in wild, almost uninhabited, very cold regions, up to Lhatsé; then three or four more weeks to Lhasa. Desideri reckons 168 days of travel for a trip which in fact, because of a necessary halt, lasted from 17 August 1715 to 18 March 1716. For the first three months of the journey, it was necessary to carry all of one’s own food—tea, butter, barley flour, dried meat for the men, grain, flour or peas for the horses—because there was nothing to eat. In addition, there was, like everywhere in Tibet and especially in all regions that were little inhabited, great risk of bandits. This is why it was not customary to travel alone: one organized a strong, well armed caravan, or joined a large caravan, merchant or official, and placed oneself under its protection.
From Lhasa, crossroads of routes to the Himalayas, south and west, there radiated two more major “routes,” whatever concrete sense one gives to this word, two classic routes to Mongolia and especially China: the Xining route and the Sichuan route.
THE XINING ROUTE
Xining, the Chinese city at the gates of the empire, was the emporium for trade between Tibet, China and the Mongol kingdoms; the ties between the latter and the Dalai Lama were, we know, close in the seventeenth century—political and religious ties. It was also through Xining that one passed to go from Lhasa to Beijing and Jehol (Chengde), the two residences of the Qing emperors, after 1644. A route of merchants, ambassadors, taken by princes and Dalai Lamas, the Xining–Lhasa route seems to have played, then, a role as important as that of Lhasa–Kathmandu.
Today the trip is made in five days by car. Until 1955, it was a journey of three to four and a half months, on horseback for the men, on the backs of camels and yaks for the goods (camels only between Xining and Nakchu). It was, by the old route, a little more than 2,100 kilometers and it was necessary to cross a desolate windy plateau and the Tangla pass at 5,200 meters. But there again, what was feared most, were the bandits, up to Nakchu. For the rest, the journey was less hard than in Ngari.
What did one buy, what did one sell in Xining? The Tibetan products already mentioned: gold, musk, furs, woolen cloth, wool, stag horns, medicinal plants, leathers and skins; products coming from overseas via Nepal and Lhasa, like coral and amber, conches, gems. Chinese products: tea, silks, porcelains, which China exported everywhere in the world; agricultural implements, domestic tools and utensils, food products, cloth, paper; and a lot of silver in ingots, which Tibet bought to supply its mint, silver that was going, in part, to take the road to Kathmandu to return to Tibet in the form of half-rupee coins, and that, for the other part, was going to be worked for lay and religious jewelry and ornamentation.
Xining was also an important market for livestock (cattle, horses, sheep, yaks, camels and so on), the horses being bred by the Mongols—among others, by those of the “Banners” of Kokonor. The military requirement for horses was always the determinant factor in Chinese relations with its nomad neighbors, breeders of horses. Already, for centuries, a system of trading horses for tea, closely controlled by the Chinese state, ensured, through its inspection offices in Xining and other locations, these indispensable acquisitions. Although this trade took place on the borders, it nevertheless concerned Lhasa because it was there that a good part of the tea ended up. After a troubled period around the end of the Ming dynasty, in the 1630s and 1640s, trade resumed under the Qing dynasty. The exchange ratio, under the latter dynasty, ranged from 36 to 72 kilograms of tea for one horse, depending on the quality of the latter. The tea came mainly from Sichuan. From the second half of the seventeenth century, it undoubtedly also followed the “Sichuan route” to reach Lhasa, via Dajianlu (Dartsedo/Kangding) and Kham.
THE SICHUAN ROUTE
In fact, it was probably only after the middle of the seventeenth century, after a part of Kham passed into the control of the Lhasa government, that this Sichuan “route” acquired the commercial importance for which it was known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it was the tea route, and Dajianlu, now Kangding, was for the Chinese the door to Tibet and the big tea port for the Tibetans. Similarly, its military importance also dates only from the beginning of the eighteenth century.
This route presents the disadvantage of very difficult terrain (the modern route, built in 1955–56, crosses fourteen mountain ranges). The Lhasa–Dajianlu section went through Medrogongkar, Tramdo, Atsa, Lhari, Shopado, Lhorong Dzong, Chamdo, Batang and Litang, and represented 2,753 kilometers; it was then 498 kilometers from Dajianlu to Chengdu. Lhasa–Dajianlu was made in a minimum of eighty-four day-stages. Thus, the tea took about three months to arrive in Lhasa from China; part of it continued the journey to Leh, about four more months. Between the Chinese border and that of Ladakh, in the course of more than seven months of travel, the tea doubled in price many times.
At these speeds, it can be seen how, for a merchant who invested in a caravan of goods for distant buyers, a round trip, and consequently the return of profit, could mean a lapse of time of two or three years. Apart from the time on the road, it was also necessary for the agent or merchant to take time to sell his merchandise and buy other goods; it was necessary, as well, to allow for forced halts for necessary rest, for climatic reasons, waiting for new pack animals whose delivery could take a long time, waiting for local government permits and waiting for the goodwill of customs officers.
Most certainly, journeys by sea were not quick either: Father Alexander of Rhodes, embarking at Lisbon on 4 April 1619, rounds the Cape of Good Hope on 20 July and arrives in Goa on 9 October; in the other direction, Ippolito Desideri, embarking at Pondicherry on 21 January 1727, will drop anchor at Port-Louis in Brittany only on 11 August. Such were the conditions of trade: those who went, went for a long time—a job for men who were young, hardy, little attached to their comfort, curious to see the world and without fear. There was no lack of them.
FOREIGN MERCHANTS IN LHASA
The second half of the seventeenth century is certainly the period in which Lhasa found within its walls the greatest variety of foreign merchants. While the Tibetans themselves ventured very little outside the boundaries of their country (one sees them in the countries bordering on Tibet but scarcely further than Patna or Leh or Xining, never in Surat, Isfahan or Bukhara, let alone on the shores of the Mediterranean), they had no objection to merchants from other countries setting themselves up in Tibet.
The longest established were the Newar of the Kathmandu valley. Buddhists like the Tibetans, often married to Tibetans, they formed several colonies of merchants, silversmiths and goldsmiths in Lhasa and in a few other Tibetan centers, from at least the thirteenth century. At the end of the sixteenth, they already benefited from a right of extraterritoriality, which was subsequently renewed several times.
Besides their activities as silversmiths and goldsmiths, casters of statues, sculptors of wood, whose works are still found in many Tibetan temples and monasteries, they set up commercial firms, whose descendants left Tibet only after 1950. We saw above that a treaty between the government of Kathmandu and that of the Dalai Lama, about 1645, reorganized the system in firmly ensuring for the Newar merchants a privileged situation in Lhasa, and in Nepal itself, the near monopoly of the transit trade between Tibet and India, as well as the very profitable monopoly of minting the silver coins used in Tibet.
It was also in the seventeenth century, under the government of the Fifth Dalai Lama, that Muslims settled in Tibet and received as a gift from the Tibetan government, in the vicinity of Lhasa, a park, called the “garden of the Khaché” (“Kashmiris’ garden”), with the right to build a mosque and establish a cemetery there. Most of these Muslims were Kashmiri merchants; spread among Lhasa, Tsaparang, Zhigatsé and Gyantsé, they traded in all products; their role in trade between Tibet, Nepal, Kashmir, Ladakh and the rest of India, became more important; they had in their hands the “shawl” wool trade. In Lhasa they set up, at the end of the seventeenth or at the beginning of the following century, fifty-six commercial firms. It was Muslim caravaneers who were given the responsibility of running the lapchak caravan to Lhasa.
Originally, many of these Kashmiri Muslims had first been established in Ladakh at the end of the sixteenth century; from there their commercial interests (especially involved in “shawl” wool) were extended to Tibet. The closing of the kingdom of Ladakh between 1643 and 1664 pushed other Muslims to Nepal, and from Nepal to Tibet; still others, also of Kashmiri origin, had first emigrated to the plains of India and from there embarked upon business right up to Tibet.
For convenience and security, these merchant communities, Newar as well as Kashmiri, were organized with a head merchant, or several head merchants, representing them, protecting their rights, sorting out their disputes; in addition, the Newar had an official, representative of their king; the Kashmiris seem to have gained fewer privileges than the Newar.
Another category of Muslims who will make a place for themselves in Lhasa and Zhigatsé, perhaps not before the end of the seventeenth century, is that of the Chinese Muslims originally from Gansu. These merchants dealt in Chinese silks and pearls, perhaps freshwater pearls from Siberian lakes and rivers.
The Tibetan authorities seem to have willingly tolerated these foreigners, non-Buddhist but not proselytizing, and devoted to business. Contrariwise, phases of favor and disfavor alternated with regard to Christian missionaries, who appear from 1624, do not engage in business, but do try to convert.
Also reported in Lhasa, right at the beginning of the eighteenth century, are merchants from Bhutan, “Tartar” merchants, that is to say Mongols, and, subject to the observation made above, “Muscovite” merchants; finally, a category of merchants on which we are best informed: the Armenians.
The Armenians—they are everywhere in the seventeenth century: in Persia, India, Tibet, one finds them at all the major crossroads of trade and commerce. Many originally come from New Julfa (Iulfa, Zulfa), a suburb of Isfahan where, in 1605, the king of Persia, Shah Abbas, had forced the transfer of 1,200 Armenian families from Julfa on the Araxe in Armenia. These families established a merchant colony that sent its agents everywhere, from Europe to Tibet by way of Persia and India, and later, spread here and there through families and communities.
Originally, they were of course Christians. In Persia and in Mogul India, though theoretically having the right to remain so, they were subject to so much pressure, harassment and taxation, that some, to avoid this, became Muslims.
They were solidly established in the port of Surat; they had been, for a long time, in Agra, Patna, Madras, Hooghly—in Calcutta before Calcutta, as it were. They took sides, later, with the British, and played a big role in the setting up of the East India Company in Calcutta in fact and in the granting by the Moguls to the British of firmans and trade privileges. The Armenian network stretched from Delhi to Kabul, from Kandahar to Balkh, to Bukhara, to Tabriz, to Trebizonde; in fact, they sent agents, as we have seen, just as easily to Danzig as to Lhasa and Xining. They were forwarding agents in all merchandise; through them passed Kashmiri shawls, gold, musk, spices, a thousand and one types of Indian fabrics, cottons and silks, rhubarb, coral, amber, pearls, yak tails and saffron, padlocks, knives and bullets, paper, glass bottles, tea and cardamom. They were skillful, organized, experienced, they always spoke several languages; they made a vocation of commerce; peaceably, they succeeded.
Nevertheless, the period of their activity in Tibet was brief; the traces we have of them go from the 1680s to the year of the Zunghar invasion, 1717. After the capture of Lhasa and the years of trouble and violence that followed, one no longer saw them again in Tibet; nor, moreover, the mysterious “Muscovites” either. The Newar, the Kashmiris and the Chinese Muslims stayed.
RICH COUNTRY, POOR COUNTRY?
These imports of precious materials (silks, gems, amber, coral, pearls) are difficult to associate in our minds with a relatively small population, made up essentially of peasants and livestock breeders living a life that is materially crude, even rudimentary, as simple as that of its many monks. Who, then, made up the Tibetan clientele capable of buying this luxury merchandise? The religious and lay aristocracy that was concentrated, at that time, in Lhasa and Zhigatsé? Those responsible for the construction and ornamentation of temples and palaces, starting with the Potala? Did the feudal landlords become wealthy, did a class of well-to-do merchants come into existence? What proportion of the imported precious materials stayed in Tibet, and what proportion, arriving in Lhasa, continued the journey to Xining or to Kathmandu to reach other foreign buyers?
One at least partial answer to these questions is, of course, the concentration of these precious materials in the temples and monasteries, to which rumor soon attributed fabulous treasures, treasures constantly growing, never put back into circulation in the economy but consecrated, fixed, to the veneration of the deities (those of the Potala and Trashilhünpo, the most famous, will be plundered in the eighteenth century by enemy armies, but the rumor will long outlive them). Was there not, however, some exaggeration, on the part of observers, as to the real importance of this category of imports in Tibet’s balance of trade?
On the other hand, if we compare the bulk of exports—which include precious materials, gold and musk in particular, plus an unknown quantity of wool products and all the other products mentioned above—with the bulk of imports—where it is necessary to count big essential purchases like tea, currency, the silver ingots for making it, and all the other merchandise enumerated above (though having very little data at our disposal)—one is tempted to think that what left Tibet was sold cheap compared to the world market price (then resold at a much higher price in other countries)—in any case, this is certain for gold—while in the opposite direction, Tibet bought at high prices. In the process, there was profit to be made, which consequently attracted foreign merchants. Moreover, we have seen that Tibet exported, almost exclusively, unfinished products (unrefined gold, unprocessed musk, unwashed “shawl” wool, medicinal herbs in bulk) and imported many manufactured products that included the cost of the work, the most striking example being its own currency.