Qing Expedition to Tibet (1720): The Qing Take Lhasa

The Qing expedition to Tibet in 1720 was a military campaign by the Qing dynasty of China that drove the Dzungar Mongols out of Lhasa and enthroned the Seventh Dalai Lama. Ordered by the Kangxi Emperor, it marked the beginning of a Qing presence in Tibet that would last, in changing forms, until the fall of the dynasty in 1912.

Background: Tibet and the Mongols

Since the seventeenth century the Dalai Lamas of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism had been the most respected religious authority among both Tibetans and Mongols. Political power in Tibet was held from 1642 by the Khoshut Mongol khans, who acted as protectors of the Dalai Lama.

In 1705–1706 the Khoshut ruler Lhazang Khan seized full control in Lhasa and deposed the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, whom he considered unfit. The young lama died in 1706 while being taken to China, and Lhazang installed a rival candidate who was widely rejected. Many Tibetans and Mongols instead recognised a boy born in Lithang in 1708, Kelzang Gyatso, as the true rebirth. He was later placed under Qing protection at the monastery of Kumbum in Qinghai.

The Dzungar invasion of 1717

The Dzungars, a powerful western Mongol state ruled by Tsewang Rabtan, were the Qing’s main rivals in Inner Asia. In 1717 a Dzungar army of several thousand men under Tsering Dondup crossed the high deserts of northern Tibet and marched on Lhasa, claiming to come to restore the true Dalai Lama.

Lhasa fell at the end of 1717 and Lhazang Khan was killed. The Dzungars soon lost Tibetan support by looting monasteries and persecuting the rival Nyingma school, and they did not bring the young Dalai Lama, whom the Qing held.

The Kangxi Emperor sent a first relief force in 1718, but it was surrounded and destroyed near the Nagchu (Salween) River in the autumn of that year.

The disaster showed how hard it was to fight on the Tibetan plateau. Armies had to cross hundreds of kilometres of high, thinly populated country where grain and fodder were scarce and many men and animals fell ill from altitude and cold. For Kangxi, however, the stakes were too high to give up. Whoever controlled the Dalai Lama could claim the spiritual loyalty of the Mongols, and a Dzungar-dominated Tibet threatened the Qing alliance with the Khalkha and Kokonor Mongols on which the empire’s northern security depended.

The campaign of 1720

Kangxi then prepared a larger operation. His fourteenth son, Yinti, was appointed commander-in-chief and directed the campaign from Qinghai. Two main armies advanced in 1720:

• The northern army under Yanxin marched from Qinghai, escorting the young Dalai Lama together with Khoshut Mongol princes. It repulsed Dzungar attacks on the way.
• The southern army under Galbi, with the Sichuan commander Yue Zhongqi, advanced through Kham in eastern Tibet.

Meanwhile Tibetan nobles, including Polhané Sönam Topgyé in Tsang and Khangchenné in western Tibet, raised forces against the Dzungars. Caught between these threats, Tsering Dondup retreated northwards in the late summer of 1720. His army lost many men to hunger and cold on the long march back to Dzungaria, and only a fraction of the force that had taken Lhasa returned home.

The southern army entered Lhasa in September 1720, and in October Kelzang Gyatso was enthroned in the Potala Palace as the Seventh Dalai Lama.

Aftermath

The Qing abolished the office of regent and in 1721 set up a council of Tibetan ministers, with Khangchenné as its leading member, while a Qing garrison remained in Lhasa. A stone stele recording the emperor’s account of the campaign was erected in Lhasa, presenting the Qing as liberators who had restored the Dalai Lama and protected Buddhism. Tibetan accounts, by contrast, stress the role of local nobles such as Polhané and Khangchenné in driving out the Dzungars, and they viewed the Qing as patrons rather than rulers. Kangxi died in 1722, and his successor, the Yongzheng Emperor, reduced the garrison.

Rivalries among the ministers led to the murder of Khangchenné in 1727 and a brief civil war, won by Polhané. The Qing then stationed two imperial residents, the ambans, in Lhasa, and Polhané ruled Tibet under Qing protection until his death in 1747.

Timeline

• 1705–1706: Lhazang Khan deposes the Sixth Dalai Lama, who dies in 1706.
• 1708: Kelzang Gyatso, the future Seventh Dalai Lama, is born in Lithang.
• 1717, late in the year: Dzungar forces take Lhasa and kill Lhazang Khan.
• 1718: A first Qing relief army is destroyed in northern Tibet.
• 1720, September: Qing troops enter Lhasa after the Dzungar withdrawal.
• 1720, October: The Seventh Dalai Lama is enthroned in the Potala.
• 1727–1728: Civil war in Tibet; ambans are posted to Lhasa.

Why it matters

The 1720 expedition ended the Dzungar attempt to control the Dalai Lama and brought Tibet within the Qing sphere. It began a long Qing involvement that culminated in the destruction of the Dzungar Khanate and shaped later disputes over Tibet’s status, from the British expedition of 1903–1904 to the present day.