Tibetan people

The inhabitants of the region of present Cambodia have by the first century CE developed relatively stable, organized societies that have far surpassed the primitive stage in culture and technical skills.

The most advanced groups live along the coast and in the lower Mekong River valley and delta regions where they cultivate rice and keep domesticated animals.

The Khmer, like the other early peoples of Southeast Asia such as the Pyu, Mon, Cham, Malay and Javanese, are influenced by Indian and Sri Lankan traders and scholars, adapting their religions, sciences, and customs and borrowing from their languages.

The Khmer also acquire the concept of the Shaivite Deva Raja (God-King) and the great temple as a symbolic holy mountain.

The Three Kingdoms period in China’s history, part of an era of disunity called the Six Dynasties immediately following the loss of de facto power of the Han dynasty emperors, refers in a strict academic sense to the period between the foundation of the Wu in 222 and the conquest of the Shu by the Kingdom of Wei in 263.

Although the three kingdoms had been reunited temporarily in 278 by the Jin Dynasty founded in 265 by the Sima family, the contemporary non-Han Chinese Wu Hu ethnic groups had controlled much of the country in the early fourth century and provoked large-scale Han Chinese migrations to south of the Chang Jiang.

The Di people had rebelled in 303 and later captured Chengdu, establishing the state of Cheng Han.

Under Liu Yuan, the Xiongnu had rebelled near today's Linfen County and established the state of Han Zhao.

His successor Liu Cong had captured and executed the last two Western Jin emperors.

The Sixteen Kingdoms, or less commonly the Sixteen States, are a collection of numerous short-lived sovereign states that have coalesced in China proper and its neighboring areas from 304 after the retreat of the Jin Dynasty to South China in 317.

Almost all rulers of the kingdoms are part of the Wu Hu ethnicity and claim to be the emperors and wangs (kings).

Many nomadic ethnic groups are involved, including ancestors of the Turks, Mongolians, and Tibetans, most of which peoples had to some extent been "Sinicized" long before their ascent to power.

Some of them, notably the Qiang and the Xiongnu, had already been allowed to live in the frontier regions within the Great Wall since late Han times.

The Han Chinese have founded Former Liang and the state of Wei.

Six Chinese rulers of the Former Liang remained titularly under the government of the Jin Dynasty, whose emperors, who are of Chinese stock, now rule southern China from Nanjing.

The Tuoba seizure of China’s northern border areas in 386 has little affected the Chinese heartland, which boasts a large population and a well-integrated social and economic system organized along Confucianist and Buddhist principles.

By the close of the fourth century, a series of sixteen nomadic kingdoms have ruled North China since the erection of the first Xiongnu kingdom in the century’s first decade.

Emperors of Chinese stock rule southern China from Nanjing.

Prominent figure painter Gu Kaizhi, who flourishes in the latter half of the fourth century, is the putative creator of a hand scroll (the earliest surviving example) entitled Admonitions of the Instructress of the Ladies of the Palace.

Such scrolls typically portray human figures as edifying exemplars of good character.

The creator of Admonitions, employing a needle-fine brush point, brings a keen psychological sense to the delineation of his subjects, embodying them by their clothes, rather than by their flesh.

The Admonition Scroll, dated between the sixth and eighth century CE—probably an early Tang dynasty copy —illustrates nine stories from a political satire about Empress Jia Nanfeng written by Zhang Hua, who lived from about 232 to 302.

Beginning in the eighth century, many collectors and emperors left seals, poems, and comments on the scroll.

The Admonition Scroll will be stored in the emperor's treasure until it is looted by the British army in the Boxer Uprising in 1900.

It is today in the British Museum collection, missing the first three scenes.

There is another surviving copy of this painting, made during the Song Dynasty and is now held in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The Song version is complete in twelve scenes.

Songtsän Gampo becomes the first emperor of the Tibetan Empire after his father Namri Songtsen is poisoned.

Tibet's power expands beyond Lhasa (Tibetan Plateau) and the Yarlung Valley during his reign.

Historians note that some contributors to Emperor Gaozu's establishment of Tang had been wrongly killed by him or killed based on little evidence of wrongdoing, including Liu Wenjing, in 619, on an accusation that he had engaged sorcerers; Emperor Gaozu's cousin Dugu Huai'en in 620, on an accusation of treason; Li Zhongwen the Duke of Zhenxiang, in 620, on the accusation of collaboration with Eastern Tujue; and Liu Shirang the Duke of Yingyang, in 623, on the accusation of collaboration with Eastern Tujue.

The Pyu complete their commercial center of Sri Ksetra in the dry zone of present northern Burma in 638.

Sri Ksetra or Thaye Khittaya (lit., "Field of Fortune" or "Field of Glory"), located eight kilometers southeast of Prome (Pyay) at present-day Hmawza village, is the last and southernmost Pyu capital.

The city, founded between the fifth and seventh centuries, likely overtook Halin as the premier Pyu city by the seventh or eighth century, and will retain that status until the Mranma arrive in the ninth century.

The city is home to at least two dynasties, and maybe three.

The first dynasty, called the Vikrama Dynasty, is believed to have launched the Pyu calendar, which will later become the Burmese calendar, on March 22, 638.

Songtsän Gampo builds the first palace on the site of the Potala Palace in Lhasa.

Tibetan forces, apparently commanded by Songtsän Gampo himself, raid the Tang frontier city of Songzhou (modern Songpan County in Sichuan) in the fall of 638, but meanwhile send emissaries to the Tang capital Chang'an, again offering tributes and declaring that they are intending to welcome a princess.

The size of Songtsän Gampo’s army is given as one hundred thousand by Tibetan sources and over two hundred thousand by Chinese sources.

They defeat a force sent against them by the Songzhou governor Han Wei.

According to the Chinese annals, Taizong respondd by commissioning the general Hou Junji to command an army, assisted by the generals Zhishi Sili, Niu Jinda and Liu Jian.

Led by Niu, the Tang army inflicts heavy casualties on the Tibetans in a surprise night attack.

Alarmed, Songtsän Gampo withdraws, sent emissaries and tributes to Chang'an to apologize and to again request marriage.

Emperor Taizong agrees this time.

However, no further action will be taken to carry out the marriage for about two years.

A basket of Buddhist scriptures had arrived in Tibet from India in the fifth century during the reign of Thothori Nyantsen, the twenty-eighth king of Tibet according to the Tibetan legendary tradition.

Written in Sanskrit, they are not translated into Tibetan until the reign of king Songtsän Gampo.

While there is doubt about the level of Songtsän Gampo's interest in Buddhism, it is known that he married a Chinese Tang Dynasty Buddhist princess, Wencheng, who had come to Tibet with a statue of Shakyamuni Buddha.

It is clear from Tibetan sources however that some of his successors became ardent Buddhists.

The records show that Chinese Buddhists are actively involved in missionary activity in Tibet, they do not have the same level of imperial support as Indian Buddhists, with tantric lineages from Bihar and Bengal.

Songtsän Gampo according to a Tibetan legendary tradition also married a Nepalese Buddhist princess, Bhrikuti.

He will already be regarded by the second half of the eighth century as an embodiment of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara.

Emperor Taizong of Tang had meanwhile sent the general Li Jing against Tuyuhun in late 634  and, in a major campaign, had overpowered Tuyuhun's Busabo Khan Murong Fuyun, who was killed in flight.

Tang thereafter appointed Murong Fuyun's son Murong Shun as Tuyuhun's khan and, after Murong Shun was assassinated late in 635, supported Murong Shun's son Murong Nuohebo as khan.

Feng Dexia appeared to have gotten to Tibet around the same time.

By this time, Songtsän Gampo is aware that, in the past, the khans of the Eastern Turkic Khaganate and Tuyuhun had arranged marriages of state with China and therefore sends an emissary to accompany Feng back to Tang with further tribute to request to marry a Tang princess.

Emperor Taizong had received the emissary with elaborate courtesy; he reciprocates four years later by dispatching a group of high officials to visit the Tibetan monarch.

When the Tibetan emissary returns to Tibet, he informs Songtsän Gampo, falsely according to Tibetan historical sources, that Taizong was disposed to approve a dynastic marriage but changed his mind after hearing the Tibetans slandered by the Tuyuhun.

It was said that Murong Nuohebo had visited Tang and was interfering, leading to Taizong's refusal.

Songtsän Gampo, believing the report, attacks Tuyuhun in late 637 and early 638, capturing some of them and forcing the rest to flee north of Qinghai Lake.

The Chinese general, Xue Rengui, commands a huge army of allegedly one hundred thousand men.

He leaves his slower-moving baggage train and twenty thousand soldiers under Guo Daifeng behind and advances with the rest to Kokonur Lake.

The Tibetans attack and capture the Chinese baggage train, and proceed to destroy Xue's own army at the Dafei River.

Chinese control over the Tarim basin collapses in the aftermath of the battle.

The Arab-led tide of Islam reaches Inner Asia at about this time.

After a bitter struggle, the Chinese are ejected from the Oxus Valley, but with Uyghur assistance they defeat Muslim efforts to penetrate into Xinjiang.

The earliest Mongol links with Tibetan Buddhism, or Lamaism, also may have been established in this period.

During this time, the Khitan of western Manchuria take advantage of the situation to throw off Chinese control, and they begin to raid northern China.

The Tang, despite these crippling losses, recover and, with considerable Uyghur assistance, hold their frontiers.