List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgment
A Note on Romanization
Maps
1 The House of Tsarong
2 A Sojourn in India
3 The School Years in Lhasa
4 Gyantse, the Estates and the Interregnum Period
5 Darjeeling, Lhasa and Calcutta
6 A Young State Bureaucrat
7 The Great Song and the Ode to the Arrow
8 State Rituals and Ceremonies
9 The Tragic Regency Period
10 A Senior State Bureaucrat
11 Under China’s Occupation
12 In China and India
13 Early Years in Exile
14 Economic Investments of the Tibetan State in Exile
Appendix A: List of Correct Tibetan Spellings
Glossary of Key Terms
References
Index
About the Author
Paljor Tsarong received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
George (Dundul Namgyal) Tsarong's life reflects the outstanding
destiny of an aristocrat who grew up in a prestigious noble family
in Lhasa. His father, Dasang Damdul, was renowned for his pivotal
role in the modernization of Tibet, and he himself embraced the
delicate adjustments and transition from serving the traditional
Tibetan government as a lay official to working in Communist Tibet
and, ultimately, for the Tibetan government in exile in India. In
writing the biography of his father, Paljor Tsarong has succeeded
in providing the most extraordinary insight into the Tibetan
aristocracy and the Tibetan pre-1959 government. Being an
anthropologist and historian himself and having interviewed not
only his father but many aristocrats over the years, the author
offers an account that achieves the rarest feat of being at the
same time uniquely well-informed, highly accurate, extremely
lively, and magnificently illustrated.--Alice Travers, French
National Centre for Scientific Research
One of the glaring gaps in our understanding of traditional Tibet
in the twentieth century is what life was like for the ruling
elite, especially the lay, aristocratic elite who formed roughly
half of the government bureaucracy. Paljor Tsarong has written a
fascinating and important book that helps to redress that gap by
writing about his father, the well-known English-speaking
aristocratic official known widely as George Tsarong. Paljor
Tsarong is one of the most knowledgeable scholars, Tibetan or
Western, of the traditional Tibetan political system and in this
book he not only presents an insider's view of the world of his
father--who was one of the elite Tibetans most interested in
creating a modernized Tibet--but also gives us an important
exposition on the workings of the Tibetan government and about
major events in modern history. Tibet was more than lamas, monks,
monk-officials, and mass monasticism; there were also nationalistic
and forward-thinking laymen like George Tsarong and his father,
Tsarong Dzasa, who sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to modernize
Tibet. Though they could not overcome the entrenched power of the
religious/monastic segment, their efforts are an important part of
any balanced history of modern Tibet, and this book opens a window
to their Tibet.--Melvyn C. Goldstein, Case Western Reserve
University
The story of the Tsarong family is in many ways the story of
twentieth century Tibet. In The Life and Times of George Tsarong,
Paljor Tsarong masterfully weaves together the national and the
personal to provide one of the most detailed and compelling
accounts available in English of the last decades of the
traditional Tibetan elite society, the Tibetan state's struggles to
engage the modernizing world and ward off Chinese subjugation, and
efforts to remake both the Tibetan state and society in exile.
Based on extensive interviews with the author's father, this timely
book opens a window into a unique time and place that is quickly
fading from personal memory.--Benno Weiner, Carnegie Mellon
University
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