Sacred Banks and Secular Networks: Monasteries, Merchants, and International Trading Companies in Early 20th-Century Tibet

In 1904, Colonel Francis Younghusband and a small contingent of the British Indian army arrived in Lhasa, demanding access to the Tibetan markets. In response, the waning Qing Empire sent forces to consolidate its presence in eastern Tibet. What followed was almost sixty years of competition over the Tibetan economic space which witnessed an unprecedented flow of goods and people across the plateau. The British colonial forces were attracted by the lucrative tea trade and the burgeoning Tibetan market, but who were the people and institutions trading tea across the Tibetan Plateau? This paper explores the growth of the Tibetan economy from the turn of the twentieth century up to WWII through the the eyes of monastic merchants and Tibetan trade companies.

Focusing on one trading family, the Pangdatsangs, this paper demonstrates the impact of the broader economic changes on monastic merchants and Tibetan traders, and the active roles these traders played in the globalizing economy. Due in part to their connections with major monasteries, which functioned as banks and corporations in addition to fulfilling more traditional monastic functions, the Pangdatsangs successfully traded along the primary route between Tibet and China, and became major partners in the Chenghe Industrial Corporation, a Sino-British company. Reversing the conventional scholarship that characterizes Tibet as a passive player controlled by either Chinese or British interests, the story of the Pangdatsangs reveals the extent to which Tibetans actively shaped not only their own economy, but also the economies of their powerful neighbors.