THE FOUR FORTS OF REPKONG A Tu Community

ARCHIV ORIENTÁLNÍ. SUPPLEMENTA XI.
ISSN: 0044-8699
MAPPING AMDO:
DYNAMICS OF POWER
Edited by: Ute Wallenböck, Bianca Horlemann,
) -($'/ùĖ&*1ù
Prague: Oriental Institute CAS, 2019

ARCHIV ORIENTÁLNÍ. SUPPLEMENTA XI, 2019
CONTENTS
Ute Wallenböck, Jarmila Ptáčková, and Bianca Horlemann 9

Introduction. Dynamics of Power: Some Reflections on
the Multiple Manifestations of Power in Amdo
Hannibal C. Taubes 13
The Four Forts of Repkong: A Tu Community between
China, Tibet, and Mongolia, 1370–1730
Bianca Horlemann 51
Muslim Unrest in Amdo: The Rebellion of
Ma Zhongying in 1928 and 1929
Hanung Kim 77
Preliminary Notes on Lamo Dechen Monastery
and its Two Main Incarnation Lineages
Per Kværne 98
Hor btsun bstan ’dzin blo gros rgya mtsho (1889–1975):
A Little-known Bön Scholar from Amdo
Peter F. Faggen 107

Constructing a Mother’s Authority: Legitimizing the Gungru
Female Reincarnate Lineage on the Amdo Grasslands
Ute Wallenböck 133

Gengya Drakkar (rGan gya brag dkar)—Its Significance
as a Place of Pilgrimage and as Sacred Natural Site
Hugh Battye 159

Beyond Majority-Minority Relations in the Ethnic Dynamics
of the Amdo Region: The “Huification” and “Tibetanization”
of the Bonan Speakers of Gansu and Qinghai
ARCHIV ORIENTÁLNÍ. SUPPLEMENTA XI, 2019
Jarmila Ptáčková 187

Distributing Fish or Fishing Hooks? Examples of the Targeted
Poverty Alleviation Program in Tibetan Pastoral Areas of Qinghai
Adrian Zenz 211

A Research Note on Recent Developments with Tibetan-
Medium Tertiary Student Intakes and Degree Programs
Franz Xaver Erhard 221

The Representation of Power and Hegemony in Contemporary
Fiction from Amdo: Tsering Döndrup’s Novel Fog
Hiroyuki Suzuki and Sonam Wangmo 241

Migration History of Amdo-speaking Pastoralists in Lhagang,
Khams Minyag, Based on Narratives and Linguistic Evidence
Contributors 261
Abstracts 264
ARCHIV ORIENTÁLNÍ. SUPPLEMENTA XI, 2019 • 13
The Four Forts of Repkong:

A Tu Community between China, Tibet,
and Mongolia, 1370–1730
Hannibal C. Taubes
The 2010 publication of the Impartial and Sky-Pervading Gaze on the Clan Genealogies
of Repkong (Reb kong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’ khyabs phyogs bral) by the Repkong Tan-
tric Assembly (sngags mang) contains a four-page introduction that should be read by
every scholar interested in the processes by which Amdo history has been assembled.1
According to the Tantric Assembly editors, the Sky-Pervading Gaze was originally writ-
ten in the sixteenth century as a genealogy of the Rongwo (Rong bo) clans. It was kept in
a sandalwood box in the treasury of the Nangso (nang so) ruler, where it was repeatedly
amended and appended over the centuries, until it had grown into an immense compen-
dium of genealogies from each village in the valley. Finally, during the Cultural Revolu-
tion the whole text was thrown into a bonfire and destroyed. However, in the 1980s an
individual named Lönchö Tselo (Blon chos tshe lo) claimed to have taken notes on the
text before it was burned, and began selling extracts of these notes to buyers around the
valley. Because historical texts were priced by the page, Lönchö Tselo would interlard
these notes (if indeed there ever were genuine notes) with spurious material. As the mar-
ket for such manuscripts grew, he began enlisting others to invent whole chapters entire-
ly for profit. By 2004 when the Tantric Assembly, with a grant from the Latse Foundation
in New York, bought the entire Sky-Pervading Gaze from Lönchö Tselo for 35,000 RMB,
“the original historical documents had become a mix of fish and turnips.” Nevertheless,
on the principle that, “of the flocks of discerning geese, many are not inferior to the task
of separating the milk from the water,” the Tantric Assembly went ahead and published
the 4,700-page text anyway.2
1 Repkong is spelled variously reb kong, reb gong, res skong, etc. I thank the two anonymous reviewers of
this paper, as well as Hannah Theaker, Max Oidtmann, Anna Sehlanova, Per Sørensen, Gerald Roche, Alex
Rhea, Brian Baumann, and all the wonderful Tu, Tibetans, and Chinese who assisted me at Repkong and
elsewhere. The maps included in this paper were assembled from information contained in Yu Ben, Ji shi
lu jianzheng, 2:335–37; Wu and Liu, Hezhou zhi, 1:56–57; Wang Quanchen, Hezhou zhi, 1:90–93 ; Cui
and Zhang, “Ming-Qing shiqi Qinghai diqu yichuan shezhi,” 83; Zhang Yu, Bian zheng kao, 235–44; Liu
Jianjun, “Ming changcheng Gansu zhen fangyu tixi”; Chen Shiming, “Ming dai Gansu jing nei ershisi guan
kaolüe.”
2 “… sngon ma’i lo rgyus ma yig de nya nyung bsres pa’i phung por bsgyur pa dang /” and “dpyod ldan
ngang mo’i khyu tshogs las mang po zhig la chu dang ‘o ma dbye ba’i nus mthu mi dman pa /.” This story
is told in ‘Jam dbyangs grags pa, Reb gong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’ khyabs phyogs bral, 1–4, quotes at 4.
14 • Hannibal C. Taubes
Unfortunately, the damage to Repkong (Chin. Tongren 同仁) historiography had

already been done. Since Lönchö Tselo began selling his doctored or forged genealogical
manuscripts in the 1980s, there has been an incredible boom of historical writing from
Repkong, to the point that almost every village in the valley now has one or more book-
length studies devoted to it in Tibetan. Almost all of these works rely heavily on Lönchö
Tselo’s texts, particularly to fill in those topics that the standard Buddhist sources do not
discuss: the secular history of the valley’s noble families, and the obscure pre-dGe lugs
period prior to the mid-seventeenth century.3 In the polarized multiethnic environment
of Repkong, most of these post-1980s histories are also openly polemical or Tibetan-na-
tionalist. Authors assert the nominally Tu-nationality villagers’ descent from the cul-
ture-heroes Gar Tongtsen (mGar stong btsan) and Princess Wencheng 文成, or attempt
to fit the valley’s past into the historiographical scheme of Central Tibet, from the sPur
rgyal Emperors to the dGa ldan pho brang of the Dalai Lamas.4 More to the point, these
Repkong historians and the Western scholars who have followed them all accept the nar-
rative of Repkong’s “combined religious and secular government” (chos srid zung ‘brel),
headed from the thirteenth century on by the solidly Tibetan Nangso headmen and the
monks of Rongwo Monastery (Rong bo dgon chen).5
I recount this depressing story here for two reasons. First, especially since the closure
of Central Tibet to most foreigners after 2008, the once obscure Repkong Valley has be-
come an increasingly popular destination for Tibetological researchers. Until we have a
critical bibliographic study of the sources on Repkong history, I caution against taking at
face-value any of the historiographical self-representations, in any language, originating
from the valley. Second, I draw attention to the shaky foundations of our received view of
Repkong’s past because this paper forms something of an alternative history of the valley,
3 For examples of the citation of Lönchö Tselo’s text in Repkong village history, see lHa rgyal dpal, rMa yul
rong bo blon chos, 4; ’Jigs med bsam grub, Rep gong Seng ge gshong gi lo rgyus gangs ri’i chu rgyun zhes
bya ba, 6; dGe ’dun don grub, Reb gong sgo dmar dor sde’i lo rgyus, 222; Blo bzang snyan grags, gNyan
thog byams pa gling gi lo rgyus, 397. Zho ’ong lo rgyus rtsom sgrig tshogs pa, mDo smad Reb gong gi Zho
’ong g.yang sde phyug mo’i lo rgyus, 682; for village histories of Repkong see also Blo bzang dge ’dun, rKa
sar ‘dus bzang chos gling gi lo rgyus; ibid., Bod skor bkra shis chos ’phel rigs ldan e waṃ gling gi lo rgyus
bzhugs so; and no doubt many others I haven’t seen. By “standard Buddhist sources” I refer to dKon mchog
bstan pa rab rgyas, mDo smad chos ’byung; Sum pa mkhan po, “mTsho sgnon kyi lo rgyus”; and Skal ldan
rgya mtsho does give a very brief account of the Rongwo Nang so lineage prior to the sixteenth century at
303–304. Skal ldan rgya mtsho, “mDo smad A mdo’i phyogs su bstan pa dar tsul gyi lo rgyus mdor bsdus.
mDo smad chos ‘byung.”
4 dGe ’dun don grub, Reb gong sGo dmar dor sde’i lo rgyus; ’Jigs med bsam grub, mDo smad Reb gong lo
rgyus chen mo.
5 For an English-language text summarizing this Tibetan secondary scholarship on Repkong’s history, which
cites the Sky-Pervading Gaze as a central source within this literature, see Tsering, “The Historical Polity of
Repkong.” Dhondup does not directly cite the Sky-Pervading Gaze but lists as its primary sources a series
of secondary Tibetan language studies published since the 1980s. Dhondup, “Reb kong: Religion, History,
and Identity,” 52–53; see also Huber, The Golden Valley, VIII and throughout.
The Four Forts of Repkong • 15
based on Chinese sources and focusing instead on the speakers of Mongolic and Sinitic
languages who in fact occupy the greater part of the Repkong Valley floor. Specifically,
this paper deals with the community known as the “Four [Chinese] Forts”6 (Tib. [rGya]
khre tsi bzhi, Chin. Si zhaizi 四寨子), a multilingual and multireligious alliance of mil-
itary farms (tun 屯) which, at least according to Chinese records, was the pre-eminent
military force in the valley from the fourteenth century until 1729. Known in Chinese
as Tu 土, in Tibetan as Dordo (Dor do), and led by a chieftain lineage known as the
Wang family Tu Commanders (Wang jia Tu bazong 王家土把总, Tib. Bang kya Thu’u
pa tsong), the inhabitants of the Four Forts have successfully survived on the borders
between Tibet, China, and Mongolia for seven hundred years. It is my opinion that they
should be at the center of any future history of Repkong.
To that end, this paper narrates three events in the history of the Four Forts. After
introducing the villages and the Repkong Tu, the first section describes the violent con-
quest of northeastern Amdo in the 1370s by the Ming armies. This conquest provides the
earliest attestations of the Four Forts, the ethnonym “Dordo,” and members of the Wang
family. The second section describes the Mongol invasions of the sixteenth century and
the collapse of Ming power in the region. Here the Four Forts and the Wang family
appear as protagonists of an inscription describing a short-lived attempt to reassert Chi-
nese control in Repkong around 1590. The paper then describes the Qing invasion of the
valley in 1729, the execution of the chieftain Wang Rapten (Chin. Wang Lafudan 王拉/
剌夫旦, Tib. *Bang *[Tshe dbang?] rab brtan), and the end of the Tu as an independent
military power in Repkong. In the final section, the paper returns to the Tibetan-lan-
guage genealogical literature discussed above, discussing the two received genealogies of
the Wang family, one of which is found in Lönchö Tselo’s Sky-Pervading Gaze and one
of which appears to have been transmitted separately from it. While remaining agnostic
about the provenance of these texts, I do suggest one way in which their narrative can be
productively related to the Chinese-language record.
Throughout the paper, I argue that several of the important Chinese- and Tibetan-lan-
guage texts originating from the Repkong Tu should be read as “auto-ethnography” in
the sense that Mary Louise Pratt has used the term: “A text in which people undertake to
describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.”7
Specifically, I identify as a central point of contention within these representations a series
6 English renderings of Chinese and Tibetan settlement terms are necessarily approximate, and the words
in the original languages are not consistent and vary over time, space, and context. Throughout the paper,
I use “fort” to translate zhai 寨, here meaning a village surrounded by a mud wall. I use “garrison-fort” to
translate bu or bao 堡 (often erroneously written pu), a word usually used in Ming and early-Qing docu-
ments on Gansu and Qinghai to mean a military garrison. I use “city” or “walled-city” to translate cheng 城,
a large and central walled settlement which contains civil government apparatus for the surrounding area.
Arbitrarily, I reserve “fortress” to refer in a broad sense to any and all walled settlements.
7 Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 35.
of narratives concerning the building, or non-building, of walled forts and cities. Starting
in the fourteenth century, I examine a series of Chinese texts positioning the Repkong Tu
as unruly barbarians who are pacified by the foundation of fortresses, and a series of nar-
ratives originating from the Repkong Tu themselves that contest, reverse, or subvert these
representations. I show how these dueling narratives have shaped the built, human, and
imagined landscapes of the frontier, and how ultimately they continue to be relevant today.
The Repkong Tu and the Four Forts
The valley of Repkong is about twenty-five kilometers long in its central section and
at no point more than five kilometers wide, following the route of the Gu River (dGu
chu, “Nine Waters”). The place forms a natural trespass between the high steppe of the
northern Tibetan Plateau and the low valleys of the Yellow and Huangshui 湟水 Rivers.
Although the land on the valley floor of Repkong is flat and suitable for farming, it is cut
off from any lowland Chinese city to the north or east by deep gorges and high passes.
By contrast, the valley is comparatively open towards the high, nomadic Tibeto-Mongol
plateau in the south.
Figure 1: The walls and gate of the Ji [Family] Fort / Nyentok (© Hannibal Taubes)
The “Four Forts” (Chin. Si zhai 四寨, Tib. Khre tsi bzhi) are four fortified villages (Chin.
zhai 寨, Tib. mkhar, sde ba) spread out along the central part of the Repkong Valley. As
is common for Chinese village names, each fort is identified by a Chinese-style surname
plus a word indicating settlement type, although to my knowledge these surname groups
are not prevalent in the villages today. The syllable jia 家 “family” (Tibeticized rgya, kya,
ga, etc.) represents an optional colloquial form in these names; the syllable tun can also
be replaced with zhai 寨 or zhaizi 寨子 (Tib. khre tsi). From highest to lowest (south to
north), the forts are:
– Ji [Family] Fort / Nyentok (Ji [jia] tun 季/计[家]屯, gNyan thog)

– Wu [Family] Fort / Senggé Shong (Wu [jia] tun 吳/吾[家]屯, Seng ge
gshong)
– Li [Family] Fort / Gomar (Li [jia] tun 李[家]屯, sGo dmar)
– Tuo [Family] Fort (Tuo [jia] tun 脫[家]屯, Tib. Tho gya sde ba or various
other spellings, also called Bao’an zhan 堡安站 [“Protecting-Peace
Station”] and, after the sixteenth century, Bao’an bu 保安堡 [“Protecting-
Peace Garrison-Fort”].)8
These four walled villages are the origin of the name “The Four Forts,” but the term
also included, more broadly, the political institution of the four military farms (tun 屯),
founded during the Yuan or early Ming, and all of the various populations organized un-
der the jurisdiction of the farms and their hereditary leadership.9 In fact the original four
fortified villages seem to have begun bifurcating early on. Nyentok and Senggé Shong
both have two adjacent walled and gated settlements, apparently of some age. Gomar at
some point sprouted an unwalled appendage around a newly dug irrigation channel that
8 There has been some multilingual confusion about these names in various sources; my hope is that this
should clear it up. So far as I know, the earliest enumeration of these forts is from 1547, in Zhang Yu, Bian
zheng kao, 3:253, although the locations here are somewhat garbled. The Great Ming stele at Nyentok Fort,
written probably in 1610 or 1620, (see below) clearly lists these surnames in descending order from south to
north: “The four forts of Ji, Wu, Li, and Tuo,” (Ji Wu Li Tuo si zhai 计吴李脱四寨). The earliest text (mid-
1790s) that specifically gives the locations of each fort within the Repkong Valley is Gong Jinghan, Xunhua
zhi, 2:56–57. The Sino-Tibetan term “Four Forts” (khre tsi [Chin. zhaizi] bzhi) is securely attested from at
least the mid-nineteenth century in Tibetan (see dKon mchog bstan pa rab rgyas, mDo smad chos ‘byung,
357), and it appears in the Wang family genealogies (see below) as the unit of their control. Today, the Sinitic
language of Wu [Family] Fort / Senggé Shong still uses the Chinese names for three of the four forts in their
old colloquial forms (i.e., with jia 家): “Jijha,” “Wutun,” and “Tojha.” See Janhunen, Wutun, 17.
9 For a relevant overview of such military farms, see Liew, “Tuntian Farming in the Ming Dynasty.” A sum-
mary of official knowledge about the Four Forts (here four “military farms,” tun) in the 1790s is found at
Gong Jinghan, Xunhua zhi, 4:162–69. Recent ethnographers working in Repkong have translated khre tsi
bzhi as “the four estates”; this is accurate in the sense that the term refers both to a physical walled fort and
to the political units and their territory. See Roche and Stuart, Mapping the Monguor, 241.
became a separate village called Kasar (rKa gsar, “New Channel”).10 Han immigrants to
the Bao’an Fort built a subsidiary walled village (Xin cheng cun 新城村, “New Walled-
City Village”) nearby, according to villagers in 1911.11 Most of the other settlements on
the valley floor, while not included in the political unit called the “Four Forts,” also seem
to have been walled prior to the Communist takeover, and the remains of these mud
bastions can be seen today around Repkong.12
The leading family of the Four Forts was based in Nyentok Village and known as the
Wang Family Tu Commanders.13 The genealogy of this family exists in two separate Ti-
betan-language versions, both of dubious provenance. I have termed these the “Atrong”
and “Lönchö Tselo” texts, and will reference them occasionally below; they will be fully
examined in the final section of this paper. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting here that both of
these texts derive the ancestry of the Wang family chiefs from Tümed (Dor smad) Mongol
military settlers in the service of the Chinggisid Empire. As we will see below, their family
lineage appears in Chinese texts possibly from the fourteenth century, and clearly from the
sixteenth century on.14
In the modern People’s Republic of China, the inhabitants of the Four Forts are of-
ficially classified as Tu nationality (Chin. Tuzu 土族). Tibetans call them “Dordo” (Dor
do). These terms are contentious in modern Repkong and the latter term “Dordo” is now
considered derogative; throughout this paper I use the hopefully neutral Sino-Tibetan
term “Repkong Tu,” or, for brevity, just “Tu.” This paper will demonstrate, however, that
both of these names have been used continuously to describe this community for over six
hundred years; one is probably derived from the other. Two home languages are spoken
10 Tshe ring skyid, “rKa gsar,” 251–52.

11 Personal communication, Feng Yuzhi 冯育廌, August 2014. This was told to me by a retired schoolteacher
and amateur historian in Bao’an Town, born in 1935. I’m inclined to believe it; the inhabitants of Xin Cheng
village are Han, and the still-extant village walls closely resemble those of other late Qing or early Republi-
can fortifications I’ve seen around Gansu and Qinghai.
12 For instance, at Sogru (Sog ru, “Mongol Division”), Nyinta (Nyin lta), Rongwo (Rong bo) itself, and proba-
bly other locations now vanished.
13 For the Tibetan spelling of the Chinese surname, which does not appear in any Tibetan source that I know,
see Roche, “Notes on the Maintenance of Diversity,” 168. While the family’s use of the surname Wang is
attested arguably from the fourteenth century and securely from the sixteenth, to my knowledge the precise
title “Tu Commander” (Tu bazong) does not appear in Chinese documents before the nineteenth century.
See, for instance: Memorial from the Xunhua County Archive; original held in Qinghai Provincial Ar-
chives, accessed via the Qing History Project, Beijing, catalogue no. 07-168-9, “Wei xuanpai Fanshu banshi
chi Ji tun Tu bazong” 为选派番书办事饬季屯土把总 [Order to the Tu Commander of Ji [Family] Military
Farm on the Selection and Dispatching of a Tibetan-Literate Functionary]. Guangxu 4.5.26. Louis Schram
noted that bazong 把总 “Commander” was a common style in Minhe Tu villages in the early twentieth
century. In several accounts this name now appears as Thu’u pa tsi (Chin. Tu ba zi 土八字), but this seems
to be an error introduced by Lönchö Tselo. Schram, Monguors, 195.
14 For an English-language summary of the “Lönchö Tselo” text, see Blo bzang snyan grags, “The Origin of
gNyan Thog Village and the History of its Chieftains.”
within this community, one Sinitic and the other Mongolic. The upper and lower forts of
Senggé Shong speak an isolated Chinese dialect, heavily inflected with Tibetan and Mon-
golic.15 The other three forts, as well as some scattered settlements around them, speak a
Mongolic language related to, but not mutually comprehensible with, the other Tu and
Dongxiang (Dongxiangzu 东乡族) minority dialects. The Mongolic language of these
three forts is, however, shared by about eight thousand members of the Bao’an/“Bonan”
Nationality (Bao’anzu 保安族) in Gansu, previously the Islamic half of the Repkong Tu
community that was exiled from the valley during the Muslim rebellions of the 1870s.16
Various toponymical references indicate that both settled and nomadic Mongolic-speakers
were common along the upper Yellow River at least from the Yuan dynasty on, and that
the modern Tu in Repkong should be considered a relict of this originally much broader
population.17 In modern Repkong, almost all Tu also speak fluent Amdo-dialect Tibetan
and the Qinghai and/or Mandarin forms of Chinese.
Culturally and socially, there is little today to distinguish the present Repkong Tu from
Repkong Tibetans, except for the language they speak at home and some idiosyncrasies
of traditional dress. These Tu confess Tibetan Buddhism of the dGe lugs and rNying ma
schools. As do the Tibetans in Repkong, they also worship a variety of genii loci (Tib. gzhi
bdag) drawn from both Tibetan and Chinese folk belief, including Erlang 二郎 (Tib. Ri
lang) in various forms, Ge sar/Guanyu 关羽, A myes bya khyung, A myes rma chen, A myes
gnyan chen, and others. In summer they participate in the valley-wide festivals of the “nāga/
song revels” (klu / glu rol), and they have unique ceremonies of their own.18 If we accept
the account of the two genealogies, it seems that historically the Repkong Tu intermarried
freely and regularly with their neighbors of many ethnicities, including Mongols, Tibetans,
Han, and Muslims with both Chinese and Arabic-origin names. Traditionally, their villag-
es farmed wheat and barley on the valley floor and kept flocks on the nearby hillsides.
15 Janhunen, Wutun, 11.

16 R. Fried, “A Grammar of Bao’an Tu,” 1–2. For the historical relationship with the Bao’an nationality, see also
Wu and Jia, “‘Bao’an ren’ yu ‘Bao’an zu’ guanxi tantao,” 83; Shi and Zhang, “Lun Bao’anzu zaoqi de minzu
guocheng.” See also Hugh Battye’s contribution in this volume.
17 Many villages in Repkong, identified as Tibetan in the post-Revolution period, have names that suggest a
historical Mongolic presence: Hor nag, “Black Central-Asian”; Sog ru, “Mongolian Division”; Ha ra pA thur
(Mong.), “Black Hero.” I also point out here a passage in the Qin bian ji lüe 秦边纪略, probably authored
around 1700 by the traveling scholar Liang Fen 梁份, that describes the entire garrison and city population
at Guide 归德 (Tib. Khri kha) as Tu. These people in Guide, if they did exist, have now totally vanished or
assimilated. Anon. Qin bian ji lüe, juan 1 “Hezhou” 河州. For the authorship and textual history of this
work, cited elsewhere here, see Han Guanghui, “Liang Fen yu ‘Qin bian ji lüe.’”
18 Nor bu, Zhu, and Stuart, “A Ritual Winter Exorcism in gNyan Thog Village,” and Roche, “Notes on the
Maintanence of Diversity in Amdo.” For the klu rol and other non-Buddhist rituals in Repkong villages
generally, see mKhar rtse rgyal, ‘Jig rten mchod bstod. Since the Chinese “discovery” of these rituals in the
‘90s, ethnographic articles in that language have become too numerous to count.
A number of studies on the Repkong Tu have been produced in English.19 Of particular

relevance to the topic of this paper are two historical works. “A Ritual Winter Exorcism
in gNyan Thog Village, Qinghai” by Kelzang Norbu et al. describes the unique ritual tra-
dition of this village and presents a short précis of the Chinese-language literature on the
subject. This paper is the first in English to touch on the Great Ming stele inscription and
the story of Wang Rapten. Chakmo Tsering’s “The Origin of gNyan Thog Village and the
History of its Chieftains” provided the first English-language treatment of the genealogi-
cal literature on the Tu Commanders, summarizing one of the two main Tibetan-language
texts on the family’s history.
The Chinese scholarship on the Repkong Tu is now too large to succinctly summarize
here. The most useful single text in Chinese is a history of the Wang family chieftain lin-
eage titled, The Thousand-Household Commander’s Winding Road. This book was pro-
duced by the last inheritor of the position, Shawo Tsering (Sha bo tshe ring, 1932–2014),
in collaboration with two Chinese scholars.20 The current paper has also relied heavily on
the careful scholarship of Cui Yonghong 崔永红, Wu Mu 武沐, and Li Xinfeng 李新峰,
all of whom are invaluable guides to the Chinese-language texts on this region.
In terms of these Chinese-language primary sources, the textual appearance of the
Repkong Tu is tied to their administrative status in relationship to the Ming and Qing
states. The Four Forts represented four of the ten military farm forts (tun zhai 屯寨)
of the middle-left chiliarchy of Hezhou (Hezhou zhongzuo qianhusuo 河州中左千户所,
Hezhou is the modern city of Linxia 临夏市). The headquarters of this chiliarchy were
at the Guide Garrison-Fort (Guide bu 归德堡, modern Guide County 贵德县, Tib. Khri
kha rdzong).21 For this reason, in Chinese documents Repkong and its Four Forts are
mentioned only in the context of events at Hezhou City and its communication with the
remote garrison at Guide. The Repkong Tu appear at all in these texts because the Ming
and early Qing governments considered them members of the military and therefore cli-
ent authorities of the Chinese state at Repkong; whatever Tibetan institutions may have
existed alongside the Tu military farms are typically not mentioned.22 This paper has
made particular use of the Ming Veritable Records (Ming shi lu 明实录, hereafter MSL),
a daily chronicle of paperwork at the imperial court, and the local gazetteers (zhi 志),
hand-books describing particular regions that were compiled periodically for official use.
19 Not cited elsewhere: Gruschke, The Cultural Monuments of Tibet’s Outer Provinces, 51–61; Tshe ring
skyid, “An Introduction to rGya tshang ma”; Field, “Dressing Up, Dressing Down.”
20 Xiawu Cailang, Bazong qianhu cangsang / sTong dpon thu’u pa tsong gi kyak kyok gi mi tshe.
21 Wu and Liu, Hezhou zhi, 1:69; Gong Jinghan, Xunhua ting zhi, 4:162. For a discussion of Ming chiliarchies
(qian hu 千户) in the Amdo context, see Tuttle, “An Overview of Amdo.”
22 See Ming shi lu and Ming shi lu Zangzu shiliao for a memorial that praises the Tu generally as indis-
pensable go-betweens with and barriers against the Tibetans. MSL 1590.10.30/Wanli 18.10 xin wei, ZZSL
1160–61.
Figure 2: Map of the Seven Stations and Four Forts. See footnote 1 for bibliographic references for the maps in this article (© Hannibal Taubes)
The Repkong Tu and the Ming Conquest of Amdo23
Chinese sources do not contain unequivocal statements about the ethnogenesis of the
Repkong Tu or the original foundation of the Four Forts. The two Wang-family Tibetan
genealogies state that the Repkong Tu were Yuan-dynasty military settlers who settled
in Repkong after splitting off from a larger group of Mongols who remained nomadic
on the Amdo steppe; Chinese records contain nothing to contradict this and some state-
ments which seem to support it. The Yuan histories attest to the existence of Mongol
postal stations and garrisons on the prairie along the upper Yellow River in the thir-
teenth century. They also mention the existence of Mongol military farms (Menggu tun-
tian 蒙古屯田) within the jurisdiction of Hezhou.24 In early Ming texts, “Dordo” (Chin.
Duotu 朵土, Duode/Duodi 多的) appears as a name for both a postal station at Repkong
and a river and associated nomadic group in the steppe, suggesting that the Repkong Tu
might indeed have been one sedentarized branch of a larger people based to the south.25
The discovery of a detailed memoir by a Ming officer named Yu Ben 俞本 (1338–?),
covering his campaigns between 1351–97, has in recent years allowed Chinese scholars
to rewrite the history of the Ming conquest of Gansu and Qinghai.26 According to Yu
Ben’s account, a Ming army first arrived at Hezhou in May 1369, under the commander
Feng Sheng 冯胜. The Chinese had taken Taozhou 洮州 in the south, but large Mongol
forces were still intact in northern Gansu and on the Amdo steppe.27 According to Yu
Ben, the commander Feng Sheng decided that Hezhou was “beyond civilization” (hua
wai 化外), so he burned the city down and massacred the presumably Tibetan and Mon-
gol inhabitants. A year later, in June 1370, when another Ming army under Deng Yu 邓
愈 and Wei Zheng 韦正 arrived back at the place, “the city walls were empty, and bodies
were piled in the streets.” They ranged sixty kilometers northwest to the mouth of the
23 I have consulted the following texts on the Ming-Tibetan relationship, not directly cited elsewhere: Wylie,
“Lama Tribute in the Ming Dynasty”; Rossabi, “The Ming and Inner Asia”; Sperling, “Tibetan Buddhism,
Perceived and Imagined”; Campbell, “The Impact of Imperial and Local Patronage on Early Ming Tem-
ples”; Ahmad, Sino-Tibetan Relations in the Seventeenth Century.
24 Song Lian et al., Yuan shi, juan 63 (Heyuan fu lu), 1565; ibid, juan 34 (benji, Wenzong 3), 770. For the
jurisdiction of Hezhou over Repkong, see below.
25 “Duotu” appears at MSL 1411.10.20/Yongle 9.10 xin mao, ZZSL 149. See Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:335–
36 for a discussion of the toponym “Duode” in Ming sources. The editor Li Xinfeng does not connect this
toponym to Repkong, but Yu Ben clearly lists it as a postal station adjacent to Bimdo (Tib. sBis mdo, Chin.
Yundu 云都). There is also almost certainly a relationship with the name “Tuo” 拖, still used today (Tib.
Tho gyA) for the northernmost of the Four Forts and the location of the old postal station. See also the
discussions below.
26 I am particularly indebted to Li Xinfeng’s superb annotated edition: Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng; for Yu Ben’s
dates see page 7. For an English-language introduction, see also Dreyer, “The Chi-Shih-Lu of Yü Pen.”
27 MSL 1369.10.24/Hongwu 2.9 yi mao, ZZSL 1.4.
Jishi Gorge (Jishi xia 积石峡), where “human bones were scattered over the wilderness,
and no hearth-smoke rose.”28
A Tibetan named Sönam Gönpo (Tib. *bSod nams mgon po, Chin. He Suonanpu 何
鎖南普), who had held a government position under the Yuan, agreed to help negotiate
a surrender of the Tibetans around the city.29 Emissaries were sent to each group, with
orders to make maps of the country as they went.30 Presumably terrified by the massa-
cres, from July of 1370 onward all the great and small chiefs of Amdo came streaming
down over the mountains to Hezhou, where they formally submitted their Yuan-period
insignia and received new titles under the Ming. In August the first Ming army, which
apparently included Yu Ben himself, arrived in Repkong. The Chinese camped on the
banks of the Gu River, which they called Tulugan 土鲁干, probably Mongol *Türgen,
“Rushing.”31 Finding neither their enemy nor any supplies there—only rain and snow
and floodwater—they turned back towards Hezhou.32 Later Ming histories wrote the
massacres of 1369 out of the record, and the surrender of the Tibetans at Hezhou was
made to look spontaneous.33
The next problem for the Ming was the postal route of the Seven Stations (qi zhan 七
站) which led “behind the mountains” (shan hou 山后) from Hezhou to the important
garrison at Guide.34 The route was located above the Jishi Gorge, and thus beyond the
traditional and functional border of the Central Kingdom proper.35 Nevertheless, in order
to maintain eyes on the southern bank of the Yellow River, and a line of communication
with Guide that did not involve crossing either the open steppe or the flood-prone river, a
route had to be kept open through the mountains on the southern riverbank. Repkong was
28 Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:318. MSL 1370.10.18/Hongwu 3.9 jia yin, quoted in ibid; MSL 1370.6.17/
Hongwu 3.5 xin hai, ZZSL 1.7.
29 For He Sönam / Sönam Gönpo, see Sperling, “The He Clan of Hezhou.”
30 See, for instance, MSL 1370.6.29/Hongwu 3.6 gui hai, ZZSL 7.
31 Chin. Tulugan 土鲁干 or Tu’ergan 土尔干. For this toponym and its meaning, including equivalent hy-
dronyms across Mongolia, see Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:314–15. Later the valley of the Türgen River is
noted as the location of both Bao’an (MSL 1378.12.5 /Hongwu 11.11 bing shen, quoted in Yu Ben, Ji shi lu ji-
anzheng, 2:315;) and Rongwo Monastery (Longbu Zhengzong Si 隆卜正宗寺, MSL 1481.5.2/Chenghua 17.4
ding si, ZZSL 2.756.) I’m also grateful to Dr. Brian Baumann for independently suggesting this etymology.
32 MSL 1370.7.21/Hongwu 3.6 yi you, ZZSL 1.8. Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:310 and 321.
33 No account of the burning of Hezhou appears in either the Ming Histories 明史, the Ming Veritable Re-
cords, or the various Gazetteers of Hezhou 河州志.
34 Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:335–37.
35 The locus classicus for this gorge as the border of China is the Tribute of Yu (Yu Gong 禹贡) in the Book of
Documents, which lists Jishi Mountain as the highest point from which Yu the Great floated tribute down
the Yellow River in his legendary remaking of the world and founding of the first Chinese dynasty. Jin
Lüxiang ed. Shu jing zhu, juan 3 [Yu Gong], 75. This attribution is repeatedly cited in all of the gazetteers
of the region since at least the Yuan, and everything beyond this range is described as “beyond the passes”
(kou wai 口外).
the natural midpoint of this journey. This strategic postal road would represent the basic
geopolitical interest of Chinese states in the Repkong Valley for the next 350 years.
The Seven Stations had not been included in the 1370 surrender for Tibetans (fan 番),
presumably because the postal workers were Yuan government employees and therefore
considered Mongol. In March of the next year, 1371, Wei Zheng summoned all of these
people to surrender at Hezhou. He set Chinese officials and “Tu” (i.e., presumably “local”
Mongol) vice-officials over them. Two hundred-household units (bai hu 百户, Tib. be
hu) were established, one Tibetan and one “Tatar” (Dada 达达, presumably Mongol/Tu).
Their thousand-household commander was a Tu official named Wang Lunnu 王伦奴.
Yu Ben identifies this figure as from Guide; Repkong represented four out of the ten mil-
itary farms in the jurisdiction of the Guide chiliarchy. While there is no definite proof,
it seems very probable to me that this Tu thousand-household commander of the Seven
Stations, who bore the surname Wang and who ruled over both Tu and Tibetan military
farms, was an early member of the “Tu Commander” Wang lineage.36 The postal station
at Repkong was initially named Duodi or Duode 朵的, i.e., quite probably, Dordo.37
Despite this rapprochement, eight years later in 1379, the Seven Stations and all the
newly-surrendered Tibetan and Tu tribes around them were in revolt. Again, Yu Ben’s
account gives a significantly different story from that in the official histories. All ac-
counts agree that trouble began in 1374, when a group of Tibetan or “Dordo” (Chin.
Duotu 朵土) nomads called the Chuanzang 川藏 south of Repkong robbed a Central
Tibetan envoy.38 In 1376, the Chinese generals Deng Yu and Mu Ying 沐英 pursued
the Chuanzang beyond Amnyé Machen (A myes rma chen, Chin. Kunlun 昆仑) and
36 Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:335–37. There are some complex problems around this figure. The word might
be a phonetic rendering of a non-Chinese name, but could also be semantic; for nu 奴 “slave” as a Yuan
period name component, see Serruys, “Some Types of Names.” Chinese commentators suggest that Wang
Lunnu should be a character error, or vice versa, for the Yu Lun 玉伦 who appears in 1375 in the Veritable
Records as the Tu member of a triumvirate of thousand-household heads in Guide, of whom the other two
are Tibetan. MSL 1375.2.4/Hongwu 8.1 jia zi; quoted in Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:337. See also Runu,
below. For the record, the tampered-with Lönchö Tselo genealogy mentions an elder brother of one of the
Wang family chieftains named Lun hu khrin, born seemingly around 1340; ‘Jam dbyangs grags pa, Reb
kong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’ khyab phyogs bral, 637.
37 Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:335–7; Wu and Liu, Hezhou zhi, 1:23 (map). The names and probably loca-
tions of these stations changed over time; the two most constant locations are Bimdo (Tib. Bis mdo, Chin.
Yundu 云都 and then Bianduo 边多) and Repkong (initially Duode 朵的, but more consistently Bao’an 保
安). Yu Ben gives the stations “behind the mountains” (i.e., above the Jishi Gorge) from Guide to Hezhou
as Haolai 好来 (later Taolai 讨来, certainly west of Repkong), Aren 阿仁, Lage 剌哥, Meiji 美吉, Duodi/de
朵的 (Tib./Tu Dordo?), Yundu 云都 (Tib. Bis mdo), and Yisimayin 亦思麻因 (Salar. *Osman? *Ishmael?).
The late Ming list that forms the basis of the map provided is at Wu and Liu, Hezhou zhi, 1:56–57; for an
overview, see also Cui and Zhang, “Ming-Qing shiqi Qinghai diqu yichuan shezhi.”
38 Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:391; MSL 1377.5.9/Hongwu 10.4 ji you, ZZSL 1.38. A useful guide to these
events in the MSL is at ZZSL 3.15. The Chuanzang are described as “Tibetans” (xifan 西番, tufan 土番), but
one text calls them Duotu Chuanzang 朵土川藏, “Dordo (and?) Chuanzang.” MSL 1411.10.20/Yongle 9.10
xin mao, ZZSL 149. For this group and its location, see Pang Lin, “Ming dai ru Zang daolu zhandian kaoshi.”
slaughtered ten thousand of them at that place.39 This victory, achieved at the ultima
thule of Chinese geography, the mythical Kunlun, in later centuries became a short-
hand for the Ming pacification of the upper Yellow River. In point of fact, though, this
expedition was only the beginning of a longer conflict. In July 1378, another Tu individ-
ual named Runu 汝奴 was in rebellion together with Tibetans in the Guide area. This
Runu may or may not be the same as Wang Lunnu, i.e., the Tu Commander originally
appointed at Guide in 1371.40
According to Yu Ben, the same general responsible for the 1369 sack of Hezhou,
Feng Sheng, resented Wei Zheng for refusing to provide him with gifts of Tibetan hors-
es. Feng Sheng used Runu’s rebellion as a pretext to have Wei Zheng impeached and
replaced at Hezhou by a corrupt commander from Shaanxi named Ye Sheng 叶昇. That
December, a Tu postal station commander named Lage 剌哥 (Tib. *Lha dga’ [?]) with
other Tu and Tibetan chieftains arrived at Hezhou driving their livestock for trade.41 Ye
Sheng sent out secret memorials (mi zou 密奏) claiming that the Tibetans had invaded.
Sönam Gönpo set off riding for Beijing to plead the Tibetan and Tu case and have Wei
Zheng reinstated, but it was too late to avert catastrophe. With orders to suppress “the
rebellion,” Feng and Ye seized the entire stock of yaks, sheep, and horses for themselves.
Lage and the other chiefs escaped back beyond the Jishi Gorge, and soon word had
spread to all of the Seven Stations.42
One of the main leaders on the rebel side was a sub-officer (cheng 丞) of the Bao’an
Postal Station in Repkong called Zongshijia 宗失加 or Qishijia 乞失迦 (Tib. bKra shis rg-
yal [?]). Qishijia and Lage joined forces with a group associated with the Meiji 美吉 Station
called the Black Tatar (Hei Dada 黑达达). The allied Tibetans and Tu seized the postal
relay horses and retreated into the mountains.43 The rebellion rapidly spread across the
steppe to Taozhou, where the countryside was overrun by a coalition of eighteen mixed
39 Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:397; MSL 1377.7.2/Hongwu 10.5 gui mao, ZZSL 1.39; Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jian-
zheng, 396–400. For the identification of the Kunlun mountain with the Amnyé Machen in Ming and early
Qing geographical sources, see Zhang, Bian zheng kao, 235–44; and Wu and Liu, Hezhou zhi, 1:22–23.
40 Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:404.
41 The name of the postal station and its commander are apparently the same.
42 Ibid, 405. For the purpose of Sönam Gönpo’s journey to Beijing and his mixed success in influencing policy
there, see Li Xinfeng’s notes. Sperling examines Sönam Gönpo in official records, but misses the all-im-
portant context of the rebellion of 1379. Sperling, “The He Clan of Hezhou.”
43 MSL 1378.12.5 /Hongwu 11.11 bing shen; quoted in Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:315. Wu Mu 武沐 con-
nects this group to the village of Hornak (Tib. Hor nag, Chin. Huangnaihai 黃乃亥), “Black Mongols/Cen-
tral Asians,” located on the mountain tops just west of Repkong. Incidentally, this also appears to be the
earliest attestation of the name Bao’an zhan 保安站 “Protecting-Peace Station” for the postal station, and
later (?) fort, in Repkong. Wu and Jia, “‘Bao’an ren’ yu ‘Bao’an zu’ guanxi tantao,” 79.
Tibeto-Mongol tribes, led by three chiefs with Tibetan names.44 The Tu and Tibetans had
now joined forces, and all of northeastern Amdo was in open revolt.45
Instead of pushing up the Jishi Gorge, the Ming armies under Mu Ying and Ye
Sheng wheeled south and relieved Taozhou in March 1379. The Chinese captured and
then killed two Tu officers (Tu guan 土官) named Shina 失纳 and Achang 阿昌, and
scattered the remaining rebels into the prairie.46 The booty in livestock was so great
that it represented two years’ rations for every Chinese soldier at Taozhou, and pre-
sumably the ruin and starvation of the nomads in that region.47 The Ming then cam-
paigned to the northwest and reached the line of the Seven Stations and Repkong from
the south. Ye Sheng “subdued Qishijia and took prisoner his tribe, seizing more than
could be counted.”48 Over the next few months, the remaining Tibetan rebel leaders
were hunted down on the steppe along the Yellow River and executed. The Chinese
armies “killed or captured ten thousand people, and seized horses, camels, yak, and
sheep that numbered a hundred thousand.”49 In this way, Taozhou and the northeast-
ern Amdo steppe were pacified, and Repkong and the Seven Stations were conclusively
returned to Chinese control.
Besides cementing Ming power in northeastern Amdo, the war also established the
pattern of the Chinese narrative relationship to the Repkong Tu. To begin with, the
massacres of 1369 and the horse theft of 1378 were deleted from history; Feng Sheng
and Ye Sheng were remembered as heroes.50 The suppression of the Repkong Tu was
also written into the built landscape of the frontier itself. The revolt of 1379 immedi-
ately became the founding tale of the New City of Taozhou (Taozhou xincheng 洮州新
城), an immense walled city completed in 1381. A stele still sits in the City God Temple
(Chenghuang miao 城隍廟) in the north of the fort, narrating the pacification of the
44 I use “tribe” here and throughout specifically to translate Chinese bu 部, buluo 部落, cu 簇, zu 族, qiu 酋
etc., all terms used more or less interchangeably by pre-modern Chinese chroniclers to describe what ap-
peared to them as discrete, usually armed non-Han groups with named leadership; the reader should thus
understand the word as both a translation of the Chinese and as a stand-in for whatever the indigenous
understanding of these units was.
45 MSL 1379.2.3/Hongwu 12.1 jia shen; ZZSL 1.44. For the ethnicity of the eighteen tribes, see Wu Mu, “Min-
zhou wei,” 34. Many of their leaders after the rebellion claimed the Chinggisid imperial surname Bao 包
“Borjigin.”
46 MSL 1379.3.17/Hongwu 12.2 bing yin; ZZSL 1.47.
47 MSL 1379.4.7/Hongwu 12.3 ding hai; ZZSL 1.48.
48 Huang Jin, Huang Ming kaiguo gongchen lu, 13 Ye Sheng juan, Ce 1, 757–58; quoted in Yu Ben, Ji shi lu
jianzheng, 2:406 (notes).
49 Ibid. See also MSL 1379.10.16/Hongwu 12.10 ji mao, ZZSL 54; MSL 1379.11.25/Hongwu 12.9 ji hai, ZZSL 54.
50 See Li Xinfeng’s notes in Yu Ben, Ji shi lu jianzheng, 2:404–407 for an interesting discussion of the ways
in which these events do and do not appear in official histories. Ye Sheng in particular is the subject of a
laudatory biography in the Ming History (Ming shi 明史). See Zhang Yanyu et al, eds, Ming shi, juan 131,
liezhuan 19, 3855–56.
Tibetan chiefs and “all the tribes of the Seven Stations” (qi zhan ge buluo 七站各部
落). After this came the establishment of military farms and the walled city “in order
to subdue the border regions” (yi jing bianyu 以靖边域). At least two other Chinese
temples on the Amdo frontier, in both cases located at the geomantically commanding
northern end of the walled fort’s axial road, have stele inscriptions or contemporary
written accounts referencing this rebellion in the context of the associated city or fort’s
founding.51 Thus, irrespective of the actual causes of the rebellion, the Chinese remem-
bered the war of 1379 as a chaos caused by unruly barbarians; the pacification of this
chaos came in the form of the walled city, its spatial gods, and its civilizing influence
over the landscape. I will argue in the following pages that over the course of centuries,
this historiographic and built-environment narrative would in fact become an integral
part of the self-representation of the Repkong Tu.
Figure 3: The late Ming border with Amdo (© Hannibal Taubes)
51 One is Guide, discussed further below; see “Guide Yuhuang ge wanshou guan bei ji” 贵德玉皇阁万寿观
碑记 in Xie Zuo et al., Qinghai jinshi lu, 95. The other is the “Red Garrison-Fort” (Hong buzi 红堡子),
located about fifteen kilometers from the Taozhou New City. The inhabitants of the fort possess today, and
are willing to show to visitors, a set of early Ming manuscripts enfeoffing them with that chunk of land in
1380 for “pacifying all beneath Heaven with martial exploits” (yi wugong ding tianxia 以武功定天下). The
northern wall of the fort has a large temple on a tower, devoted to the ancestral cult of Liu Gui 刘贵, the
founder of the village, also now deified as the local Dragon King spirit (long wang ye 龙王爷).
Wang Tingyi 王廷仪 and the “Great Ming” Stele
Other than the questionable succession of chieftains in the Wang family lineages and the
occasional visits of the Sakya (Sa skya) lamas of Rongwo to Beijing,52 the main source for
the Four Forts in the mid-Ming is a single stele with the title “Great Ming” (Da Ming 大
明) now kept on the grounds of the Nyentok Monastery (see figure 4).53 The stele narrates
the career of the Tu Commander Wang Tingyi (Tib. Ma ling yis, Śākya seng ge [?]), who
invited a Chinese force into the valley and oversaw the expansion of the Tuo Family Fort
into a large garrison in the late sixteenth century.54 The stele is heavily effaced and even
the date is not clear, while external references to Repkong during this period are few and
sometimes difficult to reconcile. Nevertheless, from the fragmentary stele text and notes
in various general histories, it’s possible to piece together a broad narrative of events in
Repkong during the mid-to-late Ming.
The first of the great Mongol reinvasions of Tibet took place in 1509, when the Uyghur
Ibari Taishi and his ally Mandulai Agulgu, defeated by their rival Dayan Khan, crossed
the Ming frontier lines and reached the relative safety of the high prairie in Amdo.55 They
found the route and the country initially quite open—no “Great Wall” blocked their path,
few of the Chinese villages were fortified, and the Amdo nomads in their traditional an-
archy could raise no large force against them. Large and small Mongol armies were thus
able to push back and forth between the Ordos and the Amdo steppe multiple times and
with relative freedom over the course of the sixteenth century. Altan Khan, the greatest
war leader of the sixteenth century steppe, launched a series of campaigns into the re-
gion between 1532 and 1577, including the famous journey in the latter year to meet the
dGe lugs hierarch Sönam Gyatso (bSod nams rgya mtsho) and grant him the title “Dalai
Lama.” In 1558 his son Bingtü (Chin. Bingtu 丙兔) took the lands around the Blue Lake
52 In the fifteenth-century Veritable Records, Repkong is still called the “Türgen Valley” (Tu’ergan Gou 土尔
干沟) and Rongwo (Longbu 隆卜) also has a Chinese name, Zhengzong Si 正宗寺 “Monastery of the Cor-
rect Religion.” The lamas are given National Preceptor (Guo Shi 国师) titles, which are handed down from
uncle to nephew in Sa skya style. MSL 1449.1.10/Zhengtong 13.12 wu chen, ZZSL 1.509; MSL 1474.3.22/
Chenghua 10.3 geng yin, ZZSL 2.712; MSL 1481.5.2/Chenghua 17.4 ding si, ZZSL 2.756.
53 Author’s photograph, stele text, Xincheng Township, Lintan County, Gansu (甘肃临潭县新城镇).
54 rGya bza’ dGe bshes, Reb kong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’ khyab phyogs bral, 646–48. A Krong, gNyan thog
gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 6 recto-verso. See the final section for an analysis of this figure in Tibetan-lan-
guage sources.
55 Elverskog, The Jewel Translucent Sūtra, 79. Mongol raids in the late fifteenth century had reached as far
as Hezhou, but these did not result in large scale Mongol migration into the Amdo grassland. Useful ref-
erences for this whole period are Cui Yonghong et al., Qinghai tongshi, 275–85; Schram, Monguors of
the Kansu-Tibetan Frontier, 566–97; Schwieger, The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China, 17–70; and
Tucci, “Central Tibetan Conflict in the Sixteenth Century.” Otosaka provides references to Japanese-lan-
guage scholarship and Sørensen provides details of Mongol-Tibetan politics not found elsewhere. Otosaka,
A Study of Hong-hua Si Temple, 75–89; Sørensen, “Restless Relic.”
(Mong. Kokonor, Tib. mTsho sngon po, Chin. Qinghai 青海), and from the 1580s moved
south to Mangra (Mang ra, Chin. Mangla 莽剌).56
Due to Ming refusal to accept the Mongol presence in Tibetan Amdo, and especially
south of the Yellow River, the 1571 peace treaty between the eastern Mongols and the
Longqing 隆庆 Emperor (1567–1572) did not apply there, and fighting raged on until the
end of the century and beyond. Judging from the amount of memorials in the Veritable
Records, the greatest crisis for the Chinese came between 1588 and 1591.57 Bingtü’s son
Zhenxiang 真相 together with another chief, Holoche (Ho lo che, Chin. Huo luo chi 火落
赤, Mong. *Qorchi [?]),58 moved east from Mangra, scattering Tibetan groups in all direc-
tions, and encamped on the Nyagong River (gNya’ gong chu, Chin. Niegong chuan 捏/掜
工川) at modern Ganjia (Chin. Ganjia tan 甘家滩, Tib. Gan gya thang).59 The Mongols
now had a major base a day’s ride from either Repkong or Hezhou. The two khans then
raided north and east deep into the countryside of Hezhou and Taozhou, prompting a
series of panicked military and policy measures from the Ming.60 More Mongols swept
onto the Tibetan Plateau in the seventeenth century, culminating in Gushri Khan’s con-
quest of Amdo, Central Tibet, and parts of Kham from 1636.61
Despite the famous alliance between the Mongol khans and the dGe lugs church
in Central Tibet, the arrival of wave after wave of armed Mongol settlers in the Amdo
prairie was a catastrophe for the Amdo Tibetans in the sixteenth century. Some Ti-
betans accepted Mongol rule but others, displaced from their herding lands or fleeing
burning villages, poured across the Ming frontier lines in tens of thousands. Inevitably,
many of these people turned to banditry to survive, increasing the chaos in the valleys
of the Yellow, Huangshui, and Tao Rivers.62 In Amdo, as in Central Tibet, this fighting
56 Cui Yonghong et al., Qinghai tongshi, 276–79; Elverskog, The Jewel Translucent Sūtra, 147–67. Mongols
were active south and east of the Blue Lake from at least the 1370s if not earlier; see MSL: 1578.5.13/Wanli
6.4 ding hai, ZZSL 2.1102. But Mangra seems to have become a central camp, at least in the eyes of the
Chinese, only gradually from around 1580; see MSL 1584.7.27/Wanli 12.6 yi chou, ZZSL 2.1121–22.
57 For a reference list see ZZSL 3.72–77.
58 The Tibetan spelling of this name appears differently in a number of sources and editions. For the form Ho
lo che, see Sum pa mkhan po, “mTsho sgnon kyi lo rgyus,” 29. Again, thanks to Dr. Brian Baumann for the
suggested Mongol name.
59 For the location of the Niegong River, see MSL 1607.1.24/Wanli 34.2 xin you, ZZSL 2.1214–15; Gong Jing-
han, Xunhua zhi, 2:62–66. The name gNya’ gong is still used for the monastery here, gNya’ gong brag dkar.
See, for instance, Epstein and Peng, “Ganja and Murdo,” 23. Ming sources depict this as the Mongol “nest”
(chao 巢), but it may just have just been the place from which they emerged into Chinese view.
60 MSL 1590.2.26/Wanli 18.1 yi chou, ZZSL 2.1152; MSL 1590.5.18/Wanli 18.4 bing xu, ZZSL 2.1153; MSL
1590.7.15/Wanli 18.6 jia shen, ZZSL 2.1154.
61 For a general summary of this period, see also Cui Yonghong, et al. Qinghai tongshi, 275–286; Sum pa
mkhan po, “mTsho sgnon kyi lo rgyus,” 29–42.
62 Schram, The Monguors of the Kansu-Tibetan Frontier, 590–592. Schram’s text summarizes the narrative
of the Xining Gazetteers.
took on sectarian aspects. Holoche was active in the violent persecution of rNying ma
sect Tibetans in Amdo. In 1590 he began work on a presumably dGe lugs monastery at
Nyagong, but allied Ming-Tibetan raiders were able to forestall the completion of this
temple by first setting the timber alight and then spreading the flames to burn off the
surrounding prairie.63 Two years later, in 1593, combined Chinese and Tibetan forces
destroyed the monastery that Altan Khan had built for the Third Dalai Lama at Chap-
cha (Chab cha/tsha, Mong. Chabciyal).64
Originally the Ming had hoped to separate the invading Mongols from the Tibetans
along the line of the Yellow River southeast of the Blue Lake, but Zhenxiang and Ho-
loche’s move to Mangra in the early 1580s represented the decisive failure of this policy.
Thus a new strategy was formulated called “Supporting the Tibetans to Defend Against
the Mongols.”65 This consisted of gathering together and then settling these Tibetan ref-
ugees along the border to establish what was punningly called the “Tibetan Fence” (Fan
li/fanli 番/藩籬).66 A great number of people were enrolled in these resettlement pro-
grams. Memorials during the crisis of 1590 mention numbers of up to 80,000 people at a
time.67 A detailed tally preserved from Xining in 1597 records more than 30,000 Tibetan
refugees, fleeing with their livestock over the border from Qinghai Lake in groups rang-
ing from seven to seven thousand. According to the estimates of the Chinese officials,
by the end of that year, seven or eight tenths of the Tibetan population from around the
lake had accepted Ming protection and resettlement.68 At least according to the propos-
als in the Veritable Records, these groups were to be allied with each other according to
Chinese-brokered mutual-defense pacts, as well as assurances of military support from
the Ming armies and shelter for their children and elderly within Ming forts in the event
of an attack. Refugee lamas were to be given titles and encouraged to found monasteries
63 Qu Jiusi, Wanli wugong lu, 9:910 and 912. “Red-Hat Tibetans” (Huangmao Xifan 紅帽西番) presumably
refers to rNying ma adherents. The raid on the monastery at Nyagong is at ibid, 906–907, as well as MSL
1590.11.5/Wanli 18.11 si hai, ZZSL 2.1163.
64 MSL 1591.3.31/Wanli 19.3 gui mao, ZZSL 2.1167; Schram, The Monguors of the Kansu-Tibetan Frontier,
592; Elverskog, The Jewel Translucent Sutra, 141.
65 This policy appears under several different formulations in the Veritable Records; fang lu bao fan 防虜保番,
fu fan yu lu 扶番御虜, etc. The earliest mention of such a phrase I have seen is from 1578 (MSL 1578.5.12/
Wanli 6.4 ding hai, ZZSL 2.1102–103), but the Ming seem to have taken the side of “our Tibetans” against
the Mongols essentially from the start (“wo shu fan” 我屬番); see MSL 1560.3.5/Jiajing 39.2. yi si, ZZSL
2.1048–49. For the Ming attempts to separate the Mongols from the Tibetans and their failure, see MSL
1587.3.12/Wanli 15.2 gui hai, ZZSL 2.1136–37; a particularly detailed and cogent analysis of the situation in
the year 1587 is found at MSL 1587.5.13/Wanli 15.4 yi chou, ZZSL 2.1138–40.
66 The compound word fanli “fence” is reanalyzed as Fan li “Tibetan barrier.” See MSL 1589.4.26/Wanli 17.3
ji wei, ZZSL 2.1149.
67 MSL 1591.9.21/Wanli 19.8 ding you, ZZSL 2.1173–74.
68 Su Xian, Xining Zhi, 2:21–25, FZZL 594–97.
at their place of settlement in order to tie the Tibetans to their new homes.69 Although
we should question how well these settlement schemes ever worked in practice, as noted
above, in the 1590s and 1600s these Ming-allied Tibetans multiple times marched to-
gether with the Chinese on revenge-raids south into Mongol territory.
The other half of Ming policy on the Amdo frontier, as it was all across north China
in the sixteenth century, was to build walls.70 To take the city of Xining again as a well-re-
corded example, the city walls were originally established in their present location in 1387
at the start of the dynasty, but were strengthened in 1539, and again with bricks in 1576.71
In 1572, in the face of the deteriorating situation, “border walls” (bian qiang 边墙) were
built to defend the agricultural land around the city, stretching hundreds of kilometers
across the rolling plain to the south, west, and north. Smaller walls and fortifications
closed up important passes, and the system continued to be expanded in the following de-
cades.72 The rural population, mostly Chinese but also Tu and Tibetan, was consolidated
into fortified villages (bu 堡 or zhai 寨). The New Xining Gazetteer (Xining fu xin zhi 西
宁府新志) of 1747 lists eighty-seven village forts that existed before 1573, mostly built in
the mid-1530s. In the first year of the Wanli reign (万历, 1573–74) a further one hundred
and thirty-four fortified villages were established, all within a hundred-kilometer radius
of Xining city.73 This presumably represented almost the entire rural population of the
area. Louis Schram noted that in the 1940s the Han population of the Yellow and Huang-
shui River basins still universally lived within these tightly organized settlements, and
that the Tu had many such strongholds as well.74 Similar fortification projects took place
all across the Sino-Mongol and Sino-Tibetan frontiers during this period.75
In the midst of all this chaos, the remote Repkong Valley and its Tu military farms
were all but forgotten by the Chinese. The place appears only rarely in Ming records. In
1587, just before the crisis of 1588–91, the Ming official Yang Youren 杨有仁 described
69 Ibid. MSL 1591.4.19/Wanli 19.3 ren xu, ZZSL 2.1167; MSL 1614.9.9/Wanli 42.8 bing xu, ZZSL 2.1229–30.
70 A general study of wall-building projects across north China during the Ming can be found in Waldron,
The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. The processes Waldron describes were replicated exactly
in Qinghai, although the period of conflict with the Mongols in this region, and thus the period of fortifi-
cation, began and ended some decades later.
71 See Xie Zuo et al. Qinghai jinshi lu, 111–14; Yang Jingju, Xining fu xin zhi, 9:1–3; FZZL 2.816–17.
72 Su Xian, Xining zhi, 1:65–67; FZZL 2.852–853. These walls and the forts attached to them are still visible on
the hilltops and plains a few kilometers south of Kumbum (sKu ‘bum) Monastery.
73 Su Xian, Xining zhi, 1:53–60; FZZL 2.822–29.
74 Schram, The Monguors of the Kansu-Tibetan Frontier, 191–92.
75 For a rural fortification project at Sanchuan 三川 (modern Minhe County 民和县) involving dozens of vil-
lages of Han, Tibetans, and probably Tu, see Xie Zuo et al., Qinghai jinshi lu, 136; a similar or possibly the
same project is described at Qu Jiusi, Wanli wugong lu, 9:910–12. Ming maps of the Gansu-Amdo frontier
depict the countryside as heavily fortified even in the mid-sixteenth century; see Zhang Yu, Bian zheng kao,
3:235–44 and attached lists.
the route of the Seven Stations thus: “From

Hezhou to Guide it is eight hundred li. In
the midst of these endless mountains there
are only six ‘Tibetan’ postal stations (fan
zhan 番站), eight horses, and eight soldiers.
Should the Mongols attack, it would be im-
possible to get word through to the interior
to send relief.”76 Ming power beyond the Ji-
shi Gorge had dwindled to nearly nothing.
This brings us to the events described in
the Great Ming stele at Nyentok. The text
is now heavily effaced, but multiple tran-
scribed versions exist in Chinese sources
from the 1980s, each with small differenc-
es.77 The precise dating of the stele rep-
resents a complex problem, but the events
described certainly took place between 1575
and 1595, and the stele was probably erect- Figure 4: The Great Ming Stele at Nyentok
ed in the first decades of the seventeenth (© Hannibal Taubes)
century.78 Although this lack of a clear date
76 MSL 1587.5.13/Wanli 15.4 yi chou, ZZSL 2.1138–40.

77 Xie Zuo et al., Qinghai jinshi lu, 86–88; Xiawu Cailang, Bazong qianhu cangsang, 52–54; see also quoted
in pieces throughout, Qinghai sheng bianji zu, Qinghai Tuzu shehui lishi diaocha, 148–68.
78 This crucial section of the text is effaced, leaving only the words “on the first day of the eighth month of the
eighth year of...” (...ba nian ba yue shuo ri ...八年八月朔日). The earliest modern scholar to write about the
stele, Song Tingsheng 宋挺生, makes a convincing argument based on the list of the officials appended that
the fort must have been built in the twenty-second year of the Wanli reign or 1594, and the stele therefore
probably carved in the next regnal year ending with an eight, or 1600. Chinese scholarship has usually
followed this dating. Wu Mu and Jia Chenliang provide a series of references in the Veritable Records
indicating that the Defense Commissioner (fangyu 防御使) that the stele describes was indeed installed
in 1591. However, according to oral recollection at Bao’an in the 1980s, when the walls of the Bao’an Fort
were dismantled in 1958, the plaque over the gate was found to say: “Rebuilding [i.e., re-establishing from
the original Tuo Family Tun fort] the Bao’an Fort, in an Auspicious Month of the Second Year of the Wanli
Reign (1574)” 重建保安, 万历二年吉月. Despite the uncertain sources this seems completely plausible to
me. Fortress gates all across north China usually had plaques stating the date of building and rebuilding,
and we have seen that literally hundreds of forts were built in the Yellow and Huangshui river basins in
1573–74. To complicate matters further, as the editors of Shawo Tsering (Xiawu Cailang)’s book point out,
the wording of the stele seems to imply that Wang Tingyi was dead at the time it was carved—the term “ji”
祭 is used mainly for ancestral sacrifices. Wang Tingyi is attested still alive and employed in 1606 (MSL
1606.1.12/Wanli 33.12 jia yin, ZZSL 2.1211–12) and thus the carving of the stele should be in a regnal date
ending in eight after this year, i.e., 1610 or 1620. My personal guess is that we should understand the stele
not as describing a single event, but instead as a eulogy narrating the entire long career of Wang Tingyi
through this turbulent era—the rebuilding of the fort in 1574, the establishment of officials there in the
early 1590s, the defense of the valley and the settlement of refugees there over many decades, and finally
the commemoration of Wang Tingyi’s deeds after his death, in 1610 or 1620. Perhaps new information will
muddies any potential interpretation, it is my strong contention that we should read the
stele as an indigenous “auto-narrative” of the Repkong Tu, justifying themselves and their
leadership within the official Chinese ethnic and historical narratives about this region.
The stele begins with a panegyric to Wang Tingyi as the military farm head (tun
shou 屯首) who, in “Bao’an beyond the borders, built garrison-forts, established offi-
cials, increased military rations ... and ‘supported the Tibetans’ (fu fan 扶番).” The text
then launches into the history and geography of the Repkong Valley. “The lands of the
Western Regions, the places of the Qiang and Rong 羌戎 barbarians” were first opened
up from the Tang dynasty. However, it was the “river-pacifying” (ning he 宁河) general
Deng Yu who, at the start of the Ming, “conquered the Kunlun Mountains, and reached
[the source of the] Yellow River and the Blue Lake.” By referring back to the rebellion of
1379, the stele touches on the common Han narrative of the conquest of the upper Yel-
low River, but the Tu identity of the stele’s hero is deceptively elided. Here the invading
Mongol caitiffs (lu 虏) play the part of the troublesome barbarians to be subdued by the
founding of a fortress. The stele then enumerates the strategic position of the Four Forts
from the Ming perspective—to the east is the postal station of Bimdo (Bis mdo, Chin.
Bian duo 边多) and one other effaced location, presumably Hezhou; to the west is the
station of Taolai reaching to Guide. To the north is the Yellow River and to the south the
valley faces the two baleful Mongol camps at Mangra and Nyagong.
The stele then turns to the fortress-building and “Tibetan supporting” activities of
its hero. Wang Tingyi ruled over the Four Forts of Ji, Wu, Tuo, and Li, and he “wished
that the Han and the Tibetans (fan 番) should unite together to work for benefit.” For
this reason he proposed to various bureaus the expansion of the Tuo [Family] Fort (zhai
寨) into a large garrison-fort (bu 堡). This probably took place in 1574, as one of the
hundreds of forts established across He-Huang in that year.79 Wang Tingyi also proposed
that five hundred Tu soldiers (Tu bing 土兵)80 be raised from the Four Forts to defend
this new garrison, supplemented by a hundred presumably Han soldiers from Hezhou
and headed by a Defense Commissioner.81 These were to be fed with a monthly grain
ration. We know from the Veritable Records that this official was indeed established
there in 1591, cannon were carried up to the fort, and that the passes between Repkong
shed more light on this. Song Tingsheng, “Wang Tingyi jian bao de lishi beijing yu Wang Tingyi qi ren,”
appended in Xie Zuo et al. Qinghai jinshi lu, 88–95; Wu and Jia, “‘Bao’an ren’ yu ‘Bao’an zu’ guanxi tantao,”
79; quotation from Qinghai sheng bianji zu, Qinghai Tuzu shehui lishi diaocha, 156; Xiawu Cailang et al.,
Bazong qianhu cangsang, 54.
79 See footnote above; also, Qinghai sheng bianji zu, Qinghai Tuzu shehui lishi diaocha, 156.
80 Incidentally, this is the only use of the word “Tu” 土 in the stele. The phrase is ambiguous, probably inten-
tionally so in this case; while “tu” can certainly refer to the people of that name, it can also simply mean
“local.”
81 Fangyu shi 防御使. See Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, 209.
and Hezhou were fortified with the Qitai 起/乞台 and Bajiao 八角 forts in the next few
years.82 Thus we should understand this latter proposal as one aspect of the Ming at-
tempts to re-establish power in the region after the crisis of 1588–91. Wang Tingyi’s
establishment of the Bao’an garrison in Repkong in the late sixteenth century and his
settlement of refugees within the valley were therefore a conscious part of these broader
population-restructuring and fortification projects, that were ambitiously if not always
successfully reshaping the Chinese, Tibetan, and Tu landscapes of the frontier in the late
Ming. As the stele tells us, Wang Tingyi’s efforts were so successful that the Mongols did
not dare emerge again. Refugees, both Tibetan and Han, began to enter the valley in re-
doubled numbers, and were successfully settled there as part of the general “[s]upporting
the Tibetans to Defend Against the Mongols” projects. Finally, “in order to describe the
traces of [Wang Tingyi’s] works, in order to display [four missing characters] his deeds,
therefore this stele text was erected as a record.”
Despite the hagiographical stele narrative and the ambitious efforts of the late Ming
officialdom, we know from other sources that Chinese power south of the Yellow River
in the 1590s was in fact collapsing faster than it could be propped up. The increased troop
movements and the fortress-building along the Seven Stations route began to provoke
resentment among the postal workers. In March 1591, a Ming commander named You
Jixian 尤继先 received word that Holoche had retreated south across the frozen Yellow
River, but a group of five hundred Mongols had become cut off when the ice parted and
were hiding in the mountains of Mangra. Crossing the steppe with a combined force of
Han and Tibetans, You Jixian ambushed the exposed Mongol camp, killing 143, taking
twelve prisoners including children of the nobility, and returning with three thousand
head of horses.83 Although tactically successful, the Tibetan response to this expedition
was disastrous for the Ming. Oppressed by the massive troop movements through their
territory, the Tibetan (fan) postal workers of the Seven Stations refused the corvée, aban-
doned their stations, and began attacking Chinese columns on the road. Guide was ef-
fectively cut off from Hezhou for thirteen years between 1592 and 1605, until an official
named Jing Zhoujun 荆州俊 was finally able to negotiate the reopening of postal relays
with the Tibetans.84 The brief surviving accounts of this rebellion do not mention the
82 MSL 1591.12.12/Wanli 19.10 ji wei, ZZSL 2.1176. For the cannon stamped with the date 1595, which still ex-
isted at Bao’an in the 1980s, Qinghai sheng bianji zu, Qinghai Tuzu shehui lishi diaocha, 168. For founding
and abandonment of the Bajiao Fort, see MSL 1607.1.24/Wanli 34.12 xin you, ZZSL 2.1214; Gong Jinghan,
Xunhua zhi, 2:62–66. This unusual cross-shaped fort, called g.Yung drung mkhar in Tibetan, is now a mi-
nor tourist attraction outside of Labrang, where all kinds of stories are invented to explain its origins. I have
not seen the exact date of the Qitai Fort’s founding in any documents, but it should be around this time; see
ibid, 2:90–91.
83 MSL 1591.5.29/Wanli 19.4 ren yin, ZZSL 2.1169.
84 Wang Quanchen, Hezhou zhi, 1:469–70. Qu Jiusi gives a conflicting account of this raid, found at Wan-
li wugong lu, 9:909–10. In this version You Jixian is not involved. The allied Ming-Tibetan force strikes
Repkong Tu, but it appears from the Great Ming stele that the Four Forts, at least, must
have remained loyal to the Ming. The only mention of Wang Tingyi in extant Ming of-
ficial documents is from 1606, when he appears assisting Jing Zhoujun and several other
officials from Bao’an to negotiate with two feuding Tibetan groups who have continued
to raid Ming supply caravans between Repkong and Bimdo.85
Ming power south of the Yellow River was in full decline after 1610, and Chinese-lan-
guage sources on seventeenth-century Repkong are very sparse.86 The postal route of the
Seven Stations was abandoned, probably not long after Wang Tingyi’s death.87 Repkong
presumably came under the influence of Gushri Khan’s expanding khanate after 1636,
while the peasant rebel Li Zicheng’s 李自成 (1606–45) western incursion in 1643–44 de-
cisively annihilated all remaining Ming power in He-Huang.88 This seventeenth-century
eclipse of Chinese influence in Tibet, combined with the establishment of Mongol he-
gemony across the plateau, opened the way to the mass conversion of Amdo to the dGe
lugs sect of Buddhism.89 Multiple Tibetan sources agree that in the first decades of the
seventeenth century, Rongwo Monastery came under a formal “priest-patron” (mchod
yon) relationship with the Mongols, and around 1630 switched allegiance from the Sa
skya sect to the now-ascendant dGe lugs.90 Again, this conversion was not necessarily
peaceful; the monk Shar Kelden Gyatso depicts the Repkong Valley around the 1630s as
torn by factional strife, while the 1707 Hezhou gazetteer gives news of fighting beyond
the Jishi Gorge in the latter half of the century, between Mongols, Tibetans, Salar, and
Holoche directly in the Amnyé Machen range south of Mangra and achieves a great victory there. As the
soldiers march back through Repkong and the Salar lands (Bao’an Sala zhu dao 保安撒剌诸道), the in-
habitants line the roads prostrating themselves and waving white banners in their honor, and offer them
wine and mutton for “ridding us of those tigers and wolves, and delivering us from suffering.” This account
is difficult to reconcile with the one found in Hezhou gazetteer and the Veritable Records.
85 MSL 1606.1.12/Wanli 33.12 jia yin, ZZSL 2.1211.
86 So far as I know, the last mention of Repkong in Ming documents comes from 1609, when another Sino-Ti-
betan force passed the Bao’an Fort to ambush a small Mongol camp west of Guide. It is telling that by this
point, successfully traversing the Seven Stations route with five hundred soldiers and returning was an
achievement notable enough to merit mention in the Hezhou Gazetteer. Wang Quanchen, Hezhou zhi,
1:470.
87 Wang Quanchen, Hezhou zhi, 1:90. An interesting side note to this abandonment was that the whole Seven
Stations route was apparently made obsolete by a “folding bridge” (Chin. zhe qiao 折桥) across the Yellow
River, which, according to the 1707 Hezhou Gazetteer, was built by Tibetans three days march from Guide
in 1680. This bridge, if it did exist, must have been an extraordinary piece of engineering, but I have not
found any reference to it in other sources. See ibid, 4:474–75.
88 Cui Yonghong et al., Qinghai tongshi, 286–88.
89 Tuttle, “Building Up the Gelukpa Base,” 129–38. See also Ling-wei Kung, “The Transformation of the
Qing’s Geopolitics,” for a politically informed analysis of the shifts in Chinese monastic patronage during
this period.
90 dKon mchog bstan pa rab rgyas, mDo smad chos byung, 304. Dhondup, “Reb Kong: Religion, History, and
Identity,” 42; Tuttle, “Building Up the Gelukpa Base,” 130.
no doubt Tu as well.91 Nevertheless, the very existence of credible Tibetan sources on

seventeenth-century Repkong, mainly monastic biographies, indicates a fundamental
change. In the relative power vacuum of the long Ming-Qing transition, under Mongol
patronage, and with a new dGe lugs faith, Rongwo Monastery began its rise to true power
and influence from this time on.
We have seen in the preceding section how the wars of the 1370s were recast in stele
narratives as the pacification of non-Han rebels by the civilizing establishment of walled
Chinese cities and their temples. The Great Ming stele at Nyentok is clearly in dialogue
with this tradition. The stele elides the ethnic identity of Wang Tingyi and instead pres-
ents the history of the Four Forts as Deng Yu’s 1376 conquest of the upper Yellow River.
Here the Tu themselves are the civilizing founders of fortresses, with the Mongols in the
position of the pacified barbarians; the Tibetan rebellions which were ongoing around
Repkong during this period are written out. Unfortunately, any steles that once existed at
the Bao’an Garrison-Fort have now vanished, and we do not know whether these events
were inscribed into the built religious landscape of Repkong with the establishment of
temples there.92 Nevertheless, the Great Ming stele clearly coopts the Chinese narrative
of the frontier and its history in order to justify Wang Tingyi and the Repkong Tu within
that framework. If we accept the latest possible dates for the stele’s authorship, the text
may actually have been written during the period of Mongol domination of Repkong. In
this case we may plausibly read the stele as Tu “insurance” against official Ming repri-
sal: a permanent profession of historical loyalty by a frontier minority, in an inscribed
narrative format legible to and respected by Chinese officialdom. We will see in the next
section that such reprisals were a very real danger, and that there is at least one other
object in Nyentok village that locals believe is kept for this purpose.
91 Schaeffer et al., eds., ed., Sources of Tibetan Tradition, 660–64; Wang Quanchen, Hezhou zhi, 4:471–75.
92 There is a temple stele from Guide that bears a clear relationship to the one at Nyentok. Written in the
same crisis of 1591, it begins with a nearly identical formula, recounting Deng Yu’s conquest of the upper
Yellow River and establishment of forts and postal stations there. The stele then describes how the Guide
military farms united to construct a temple to the Jade Emperor (Yu Huang 玉皇) on a massive tower on the
northern fort wall, gazing down over the fort’s main axial road and off to the Mongol hills beyond. Again,
four out of ten of these military farms were the Four Forts of Repkong; see Xie Zuo et al., Qinghai jinshi lu,
96–97. Before the Communist revolution the Bao’an Fort also had a massive northern temple similar to the
ones at Guide and Taozhou, in this case dedicated to the God of Walls and Moats (Chenghuang Ye 城隍爷).
Author’s conversations with villagers in Bao’an, August 2016. See also, Qinghai sheng bianji zu, Qinghai
Tuzu shehui lishi diaocha, 167–68.
The Execution of Wang Rapten
By about 1700, when Repkong reappears in Chinese sources, the Qing nominally held
the allegiance of three garrison-forts (bu 堡) above the Jishi Gorge: Qitai, Guide, and the
Bao’an Fort at Repkong. Nevertheless, real Qing power in the valley remained limited.
The Record of the Borders of Qin (Qin bian ji lüe 秦边纪略) describes the garrison and
the reigning Wang family chieftain in the early eighteenth century:
In the Bao’an Fort there is one commandant,93 as well as 128 foot and mount-
ed soldiers. [...] Within the fort everyone is Tu. It is located one hundred and
fifty li from the Nyagong River. Today the soldiers there are also all Tu;
there are no Han soldiers. For provisions they share amongst themselves,
and they appropriate the grain that should be shipped as tax. One comman-
dant in such a lonely place is as useless as a wart. Lately under the threats of
their local nobleman (hao 豪) Wang Rapten (Wang Lafudan 王拉/剌夫旦,
Tib. *Bang *[Tshe dbang?] rab brtan), this official stays within the garrison,
and doesn’t dare leave to make a report.94
Notably, the ethnic origins of the Tu as a gauge of their loyalty to the Chinese state are
now front and center in these Chinese accounts. The same source, speaking generally
of the Tu along the route between Hezhou and Guide, first describes their customs and
manner of living and then turns to their origins: “their ancestors were barbarians (yi 夷),
but they have dwelt on Chinese soil (zhong tu 中土) for a long time, and now the men
and women in their food and clothing do not differ from those of the Central Kingdom
(Zhongguo 中国).” Due to intermarriage with Chinese they have learned to speak the
language, although they can also communicate in the barbarian tongues (tong qiang
ren yu 通羌人语). Nevertheless, “In their hearts they are Han (qi xin wei han 其心为汉),
which cannot be said of the other barbarians.”95 This chauvinistic ethnographic tone is
reflected in other sources as well; the Gazetteer of Xunhua, written in the 1790s, takes
time to describe the Repkong Tu as originally Han from the interior, whose customs
were “contaminated” (ran 染) by long isolation among Tibetans. The Sinitic language of
the Wu [Family] Fort is taken as evidence for this.96
During the years of the Lozang Tendzin (Blo bzang bstan ‘dzin, frequently Lobsang
Danjin) Rebellion (1723–24), while much of the rest of Amdo was plunged into strife and
93 Shoubei 守备, see Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, 433.

94 Anon. Qin bian ji lüe, juan 1:[no page number].
95 Anon. Qin bian ji lüe, juan 1:[no page number].
96 Gong Jinghan, Xunhua zhi, 4:163.
massacre, the Repkong Valley seems to have remained relatively peaceful.97 Yangdon
Dhondup suggests that this was due to the priest-patron relationship between Rongwo
Monastery and the pro-Qing Chaγan Danzin Khan (Tib. Tshe dbang bstan ’dzin).98 This
may have been so, but the equivocal position of the Tu garrison no doubt helped as well.
Able to speak Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongol, and representing Tibetan Buddhists, Mus-
lims, and Chinese folk-religion practitioners nominally loyal to the Qing but also close
with the Mongols and the dGe lugs church, the Repkong Tu occupied a precarious mid-
dle position between the great powers of early eighteenth-century Amdo.
This all changed very suddenly five years after the rebellion’s end in 1729, when the
Qing general Yue Zhongqi 岳钟琪 marched an army into Repkong and executed the Tu
Commander Wang Rapten. There is no suggestion in Yue Zhongqi’s documents that
Wang Rapten was in rebellion or that he offered any resistance; indeed the worst any of
the Qing sources can accuse him of is arrogance towards their officials and successfully
feeding the garrison outside of their supply lines.99 Rather, the new Qing colonial order
in Amdo could no longer permit a strategic border outpost to remain in the hands of the
independent-minded hereditary Tu Commander chieftains. The Bao’an Fort was instead
garrisoned with soldiers from the interior, and the town remains to this day solidly Han
Chinese. In this way the Wang Family Tu Commanders lost control of the main military
force of Repkong, which they had held for at least 350 years.100
Once Wang Rapten had been executed, work could begin on an entirely new walled
city over the pass in the territory of the Salars (Chin. Salazu 撒拉族) on the bank of
the Yellow River. A stele recording the foundation of this city gives the tale: “The sol-
diers split their forces and advanced, reaching the lair of the enemy, and captured Wang
Rapten alive. Thus, the frontiers became clear.” Again, there’s no indication that Wang
Rapten had any power in Salar territory; rather, it seems the stele simply needed to
97 For the events of the Lubsang Danzin Rebellion, see Kato Naotō, “Lobjang Danjin’s Rebellion of 1723.” For
the Qing administrative changes in its aftermath—very relevant to events at Repkong—see Perdue, China
Marches West, 310–14.
98 Dhondup, “Reb Kong: Religion, History, and Identity,” 33–59. I take the Mongol forms of these names from
Atwood, “Mongolian System for Tibetan Transcription,” 3 and 5.
99 The apparent ur-document for these events, quoted by all other sources, is: “Memorial by Yue Zhongqi” 岳
钟琪, accessed via the National Museum of Taiwan Database, Taipei, no. 402000305, “Zou wei qing zhi yu
Bao’anbu bing Sala er di zengshe ying xunyi bingzhu fangshi” 奏为请旨与保安堡并撒拉二地增设营汛益
兵驻防事 [Memorial Requesting Direction on the Creation of Garrisons and the Increase of Troops at the
two Locations of Bao’an and the Salar Lands]. Yongzheng 7.5.22. http://npmhost.npm.gov.tw/tts/npmme-
ta/dblist.htm, accessed July 3, 2019. Gong Jinghan, Xunhua zhi, 4:163 gives a derivative account.
100 Gong Jinghan, Xunhua zhi, 4:162–69. Today the settlement called Bao’an/Tho gyA is segregated into the
old walled area, which is almost all Han, and a lower suburb called “the Tibetan Enclosure” (Bod skor),
which is mainly Tu. It seems probable that the Tu were evicted from old Tuo Family Fort in 1730 and settled
outside to form this lower quarter, but this is not clearly stated in any source I have seen. The Xunhua Gaz-
etteer contains a long series of memorials about the building and rebuilding of soldiers’ quarters here in the
mid-eighteenth century, which may also account for the expansion of the town. Ibid, 104–105.
suppress an aboriginal rebel for the sake of narrative. Money was then allocated from
various sources for the labor and materials. Now that Repkong was firmly under Qing
control, timber could be cut from the mountains there and floated down the Gu river
to reach the building site. The new city was given the name Xunhua 循化 “Obedient to
Transformation.”101 Other steles pick up the narrative where that one ended. Twenty-four
passes around the region were fortified.102 Ten years later, in 1739, the fortified town of
Bayanrong (modern Hualong County 化隆县) was completed to the north, along with a
network of garrison-forts surrounding it and the route from Xining.103
The Xunhua city-founding stele does not mention Deng Yu’s campaign to the Kun-
lun; the Ming heroes were no longer appropriate in the new dynasty. However, the con-
nection between the geography of the upper Yellow River, the suppression of barbarians,
northern axial temples, and city gods remained. According to the stele at Xunhua, as
a sign of Heaven’s approval of Wang Rapten’s defeat, the famously silty river ran clear
from Xunhua all the way down through the Jishi Gorge to Hezhou. The colonizers then
erected a Temple of the Yellow River Source (Heyuan miao 河源庙) to the north of the
city walls, as well as the city-founding stele to record it.104 All parts of the traditional nar-
rative had now played out: a rebellious barbarian had been pacified, a walled city with a
northern temple had been built, and the victory had been written into the new landscape
and approved by Heaven itself. Qing control, at least for a little while, was complete.
A Tu Auto-Ethnography?
So far we have not dealt with the Tibetan-language sources on the Wang family and its
history. This is due to the impossibility of authenticating these sources: neither of the
two Wang family genealogies is attested before 1980, and while both of the texts available
to me claim to date from the mid-eighteenth century, in their current forms at least they
are clearly the product of polemically pro-Tibetan modern editors. Nevertheless, there is
tentative reason to believe that these narratives might preserve some genuinely old mate-
rial. Among other things, the Tibetan genealogies agree with the Chinese record that the
chieftains of Nyentok Fort controlled a Mongolic-speaking military force in Repkong
from the Yuan dynasty until the early eighteenth century, and that this era ended when a
chieftain peacefully surrendered his authority to the Qing but was nonetheless executed.
101 Gong Jinghan, Xunhua zhi, 2:88–89. This translation was suggested to me by one of the anonymous
reviewers.
102 Xie Zuo et al., Qinghai jinshi lu, 158.
103 Ibid, 164.
104 Gong Jinghan, Xunhua zhi, 2:88–89.
Whatever the date of the Tibetan texts’ authorship, the tale of this final commander’s
death does represent a genuine Tu folk tradition concerning Wang Rapten’s career and
its significance. In the paragraphs below, I will briefly describe the two extant genealo-
gies and their shared narrative. I will then suggest that this entire genealogical narrative
should be read as a complex rebuttal to the Chinese city-founding stele narratives, which
rearranges and inverts elements of both Wang Tingyi’s and Wang Rapten’s careers to
vindicate the aggrieved Tu, valorize their dGe lugs conversion, and assert their agency
against the Chinese state.
The first of the two105 Wang family genealogies is credited to someone called Atrong
the Mantrin and Magician (A krong sngags pa mthu ba). I have access to this work only
in a short summary (rags tsam) given to me by a villager in Nyentok; a longer ur-text
may or may not now exist. This version claims to be based on documents found in the
now-destroyed library (yig tshang) of the Tu Commander chieftains.106 The Atrong ver-
sion also claims to have been the source, in the mid-eighteenth century, for the second
version, which is the one found in Lönchö Tselo’s doctored Impartial and Sky-Pervading
Gaze.107 Nevertheless, the two genealogies differ significantly in the dates and sequence
of the chieftains. This second version shows strong signs of having been artificially ex-
panded by Lönchö Tselo: the prophetic visions, bad poetry, and ramifying family lines
all strongly resemble the other genealogies that passed through his hands. This is also
the version that has been summarized in English, via its reprinting with minor changes
in Lozang Nyendrak’s history of Nyentok Monastery.108 I will refer to these two sources
respectively as the “Atrong” and “Lönchö Tselo” genealogies throughout.
Although these two Tibetan-language sources differ in many dates and names, both
genealogies share a common narrative of the progress of the Wang family and the spe-
cific history of Nyentok Village. According to both of these texts, the patrilineal line of
the chiefs is descended, usually by ultimogeniture, from a division of Chinggisid Tümed
(Dor smad) Mongols and “Daoist” (ta’o ca’o chos lugs) thunder magic practitioners
(gnam lcags thog babs mthu nus pa) who were stationed on the upper Yellow River.109 To-
wards the end of the Yuan period, one group of these Mongols descended into Repkong
105 These were the two sources available, for instance, to Shawo Tsering: Xiawu Cailang, Bazong qianhu cang-
sang, 40; and to Lozang Nyendrak: Blo bzang snyan grags, gNyan thog Byams pa gling gi lo rgyus, 397. A
third genealogy from the eighteenth century to the present, collected from oral recollection in the 1980s, is
found in Qinghai sheng bianji zu, Qinghai Tuzu shehui lishi diaocha, 157.
106 For the destruction of these documents during the Cultural Revolution, see Xiawu Cailang, Bazong qianhu
cangsang, 40.
107 ’Jam dbyangs grags pa, Reb kong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’ khyab phyogs ’bral, 636–56.
108 Blo bzang snyan grags, gNyan thog Byams pa gling gi lo rgyus, 20–69; lCags mo tshe ring, “The Origin of
gNyan Thog Village.”
109 Anon. gNyan thog gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 1–3.
and established a base (gzhi bzung) there, symbolized by the construction of a temple
to the god Erlang/Ri lang on the “rear hill” (rgyab ri) north of Nyentok Village.110 These
Mongols married local women of various ethnicities and, over the centuries, became
trilingual in Tibetan, Chinese, and their own dialect of Mongol. They received political
legitimation from Beijing, notably including the title “Tu Commander” which became
the epithet of their lineage. Increasingly as time went on, they also sought and received
spiritual authority from the great monasteries of Central Tibet. In both Tibetan-lan-
guage versions, their final conversion from “Daoism” to orthodox dGe lugs Buddhism
in the seventeenth century was effected by the Christ-like sacrifice of a chieftain called
Pelchen Topgyé (dPal chen stobs rgyas), who allowed himself to be executed by a Qing
emperor in order that a dGe lugs monastery might be founded at Nyentok.
The figure of Pelchen Topgyé likely represents a composite of a real individual of this
name with that individual’s grandson Wang (Tsewang) Rapten, combined due to the
narrative need to ascribe the foundation of Nyentok monastery to the same man who was
executed by the Chinese.111 This confusion explains why the chronology of both gene-
alogies is off by about thirty years. The figure that seems to correspond to Wang Tingyi
likewise appears about thirty years too early: Ma Lingyi (Tib. Ma ling yis, b.1511–d.1580)
in the Lönchö Tselo version and apparently Śākya Senggé (Shakya seng ge, r.1513–58)
in the Atrong version.112 Unusually, neither genealogy gives any information about this
figure other than his name and dates; I suggest below that Wang Tingyi’s career was can-
nibalized to form the legend of Pelchen Topgyé. The two genealogies agree that Pelchen
Topgyé’s father, Könchok Dargyé (dKon chog dar rgyas), was a devout dGe lugs Buddhist
who took monastic vows a few years after his youngest son’s birth. According to the
“Lönchö Tselo” text in 1676,113 and according to the “Atrong” text around 1695, either
110 A krong, gNyan thog gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 2r. ’Jam dbyangs grags pa, Reb kong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’
khyab phyogs bral, 636.
111 The two Wang family genealogies give markedly different dates for this figure. The “Atrong” version gives
1674–1730 (anon. gNyan thog gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 8–10), which accords well with the Chinese dates,
while the “Lönchö Tselo” version gives 1647–1702 (’Jam dbyangs grags pa, Reb kong rus mdzod lta ba
mkha’ khyab phyogs bral, 654). In his history of Nyentok Monastery, Lozang Nyendrak (who bases his
account mainly on the “Lönchö Tselo” version but also gathered his own materials) notes that there was
a grandson of Pelchen Topgyé named Tsewang Rapten (Tshe dbang rab brtan) about whom the histories
“do not speak” (“kha btsan,” Blo bzang snyan grags, gNyan thog Byams pa gling gyi lo rgyus, 59). It seems
to me that this mysterious “Tsewang Rapten” is likely to be the same as “Wang Rapten.” Both genealogies
agree that the Nyentok Monastery was established by Pelchen Topgyé or his father Könchok Dargyé in the
late seventeenth century, and both narratives delete the name Wang Rapten; the “Atrong” version moves
Pelchen Topgyé’s dates forward, while the “Lönchö Tselo” version moves the date of this figure’s execution
back. Alternately, Wang Rapten was some other name that Pelchen Topgyé used, or dpal chen stobs rgyas
“the great hero, of expanding strength” was originally an epithet and not a name.
112 ’Jam dbyangs Grags pa, Reb kong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’ khyab phyogs bral, 646–648 and A Krong,
gNyan thog gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 6 recto-verso.
113 ’Jam dbyangs Grags pa, Reb kong rus mdzod lta ba mkha’ khyab phyogs bral, 654.
Könchok Dargyé or Pelchen Topgyé established the first sādhana-hall (sgrub khang) of
Nyentok Monastery, at the foot of the “rear hill” where the original temple to the “Daoist”
genius loci Erlang/Ri lang stood.114
The two genealogies agree on the essential story of Pelchen Topgyé’s execution: The
emperor orders Pelchen Topgyé to build a garrison fort (dmag mkhar). Pelchen Topgyé
dutifully constructs three of the four walls, but runs out of money for the fourth. The
emperor gives him a second grant to complete the fort, but this time Pelchen Topgyé
uses the money instead to endow Nyentok Monastery, enclosing it in a circular wall
(lcags ri ra ba) and filling the chapels with beautiful statues. As result of this embez-
zlement, Nyentok Village today has only three walls (the fourth side faces a precipice).
Pelchen Topgyé then returns peacefully to Beijing to meet his punishment. The “Atrong”
rendition provides the denouement, and an impassioned and beautiful soliloquy by its
hero. Again, although this narration is unlikely to be particularly old, it nevertheless
represents a valid and eloquent document of how Tu tradition perceives the importance
of Pelchen Topgyé’s death:
By the benevolent sacrifice of this chieftain, Repkong did not become a place
with many soldiers. Because the chieftain Pelchen Topgyé laid down his own
life without selfishness, for the happiness of Repkong the Chinese soldiers
were not induced to come there. For the benefit of the teaching of the Yellow
Hat Sect, the Emperor did not from his inner regions create a military for-
tress, but instead the majority of the money given by the Emperor was sent
to support the Buddha’s teachings. All this was the result of Pelchen Topgyé
without selfishness offering his own life before the emperor.
Pelchen Topgyé offered this request to the Emperor of the Great Qing
Dynasty: “That my life should be forfeit is in accordance with Your Majesty’s
laws and with the customs of the common people. The speech I melodious-
ly offer to your golden ear is as follows: Your Majesty, the protector of the
earth, previously gave a promise: ‘generally in the valleys which lay before
the Yellow River or specifically in the region of Repkong, we would not need
to pay the military requisition.’ Your Majesty’s orders have no flaw. Now my
life is forfeit—Your Majesty’s command is as a boulder plunging from a steep
mountain, and no man can avoid it. But I pray that the Buddha’s teachings
and the happiness of all sentient beings will imperishably achieve greater
and greater propagation. From each birth until the next, may I be born again
and again into that land of gazing upon the countenance of the Buddha and
114 Anon., gNyan thog gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 8 recto-verso. Lozang Nyendrak puts it in 1665. Blo bzang
snyan grags, gNyan thog Byams pa gling gi lo rgyus, 54.
hearing in one’s ears the words of the Dharma, the Golden Realm of Rep-
kong!” Having said these words, he gave up his life.115
Necessarily taking its origin from the time of Wang Rapten’s actual death in 1729, this
Tu legend of Pelchen Topgyé reverses the career of Wang Tingyi to form a dGe lugs
conversion narrative that is also a point-by-point refutation of the official Chinese nar-
rative of the founding of Xunhua City. To begin with, the genealogical account of the
Tu ethnogenesis is a detailed “auto-ethnographic” inversion of the traditional narrative
found in Chinese stele texts: rather than being pacified by Chinese city-building, the
Tu Commanders’ Mongol ancestors voluntarily give up their warring ways, peacefully
settle, and build their own northern temple on the “rear hill.” We have seen how all
information about Wang Tingyi except his garbled name and the dates of his tenure has
been removed from both of the Tibetan genealogies. If the Great Ming stele celebrates
Wang Tingyi for building a Chinese garrison and settling Ming immigrants in the valley,
then Pelchen Topgyé is his antithesis—Pelchen Topgyé refuses to found a Chinese city.
Instead of building the final wall of a Chinese military fort, he encloses a beautiful dGe
lugs monastery. Instead of bringing Chinese soldiers and colonists into the valley, he
keeps them out. Instead of violently rebelling, as the Tu and Tibetan indigenes in these
colonial stele narratives invariably do, and as Yue Zhongqi and the authors of the Xun-
hua city-founding stele obviously wished he would, Pelchen Topgyé goes peacefully and
eloquently to his own execution.
Similar to the way that previous such foundation stories were associated with city
gods and recorded on steles in their temples, the tale of Pelchen Topgyé has been written
into the space of Nyentok Monastery. Although our understanding of this is hampered
by the difficulty of dating the structures in the monastery, local legend strongly asso-
ciates Pelchen Topgyé with the oldest building there, the “Earth-subduing Chapel” (sa
’dzin lha khang).116 The building was originally covered on the inside and outside with
gorgeous eighteenth-century murals, although today only the interior murals survive
intact. In the spaces surrounding the central figures of each wall, two wall panels depict
tantric scenes, another depicts the life of Tsongkhapa (Tsong kha pa), and a fourth has
the life of the Buddha Śākyamuni. The four remaining panels, plus apparently most of
the now-faded exterior, are given over to Jātaka stories, an unusual topic in late-peri-
od Chinese and Tibetan art. These Jātaka narratives, devoted to the idea of giving up
one’s life for the Dharma, celebrate the ideal for which Pelchen Topgyé died, while the
115 Anon. gNyan thog gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 9v–10v.

116 This structure has been discussed from an architectural perspective in Campbell, “A Fifteenth-Century
Sino-Tibetan Buddha Hall,” 101–102.
Tsongkhapa biography reinforces the Wang family’s new dGe lugs allegiance.117 On a
panel on the northern side of the caisson ceiling is painted a small but central image of
a figure in Qing dress, seated in state between two attendants. Some say that this figure
is the Manchu emperor, painted to avert his wrath from destroying the monastery after
Pelchen Topgyé’s execution.118 Others say that the image is Pelchen Topgyé himself, a
memorial icon of his Jātaka-inspired self-sacrifice.119
Figure 5: Image painted on the northern side of the caisson-ceiling maṇḍala in the “Earth-subduing Chapel”
at Nyentok Monastery (© Hannibal Taubes)
Conclusion
The history of the Repkong Tu after the execution of Wang Rapten seems to have been
one of slow decline. Both Chinese and Tibetan authorities continued to recognize the
Wang family as chieftains of the Four Forts, but without the garrison their importance
dwindled.120 The events of the 1870s, when the Muslim half of the Repkong Tu com-
munity was exiled from the valley, were almost certainly a blow to the power of both
117 For the identification of these images, see Bo Guo, “Qinghai Nianduhu si maolan jiwa lakangdian.”
118 Stuart and Tshe ring, “A Ritual Winter Exorcism in gNyan Thog Village, Qinghai,” 192; Blo bzang snyan
grags, gNyan thog Byams pa gling gi lo rgyus, 67, 225.
119 Xiawu Cailang et al., Bazong qianhu cangsang, 58.
120 The 1791 Xunhua gazetteer gives an account of the holdings of the Wang family chieftain at that time, one
Wang Yinluo 王銀洛. In the eyes of the Chinese, at least, he still controlled the Four Forts on the valley floor,
which were prospering, but he had no soldiers at his command. Gong Jinghan, Xunhua zhi, 4:164–65.
the family and the community as a whole; these events await further research.121 By the
start of the twentieth century, the Tu Commander’s authority was contested even within
Nyentok Village itself, and the Repkong Valley was ruled in condominium by the Han
Chinese garrison at Bao’an and the Tibetan Nangso with the Rongwo lamas.122 The last
formally enthroned Wang Family Tu Commander, Shawo Tsering (b.1932), passed away
in 2014, and the seat is now empty.123 Today the long and interesting history of the Wang
family chieftains is largely forgotten, even among the Tu themselves. As far as their Ti-
betan neighbors are concerned, the Repkong Tu are an unimportant minority who have
accepted the truth of dGe lugs Buddhism, are good at drawing thang ka icons, and have
a language that, on those increasingly uncommon occasions when one must listen to it,
sounds like the twittering of birds.124 According to Tibetan histories, and the Chinese
and English histories that follow them, the entire Repkong Valley was ruled uncontested
from the thirteenth century until the Communist takeover by the solidly Tibetan Rong-
wo Nangso, of the Sakya Khön (‘Khon) line.
And yet these Tu narratives continue to be relevant today. The tale of Pelchen
Topgyé/Wang Rapten is still told today among the Repkong Tu. The last inheritor of
the Tu Commander position, Shawo Tsering, has informally published his memoirs in
Chinese. In his devastating account of his experiences between 1958 and 1976, including
the deaths of his mother, wife, and two infant sons, he seems to draw on the rhetoric
of his ancestor Wang Rapten, proclaiming his aggrieved loyalty towards the genocidal-
ly abusive Chinese state.125 One can point to a number of other folk stories today, told
in multiple languages across Amdo, that seem to be subversive or subaltern inversions
of Chinese official narratives.126 Moreover, as the strange tale of Lönchö Tselo’s inter-
polations and the recent graphophilic boom in nationalistic Tibetan-language histori-
cal writing in Repkong show, the construction of historical narratives continue to have
intense relevance in contemporary Amdo.
121 Wu and Jia, “‘Bao’an Ren’ yu ‘Bao’an Zu’ guanxi tantao,” 83; Shi and Zhang, “Lun Bao’anzu zaoqi de minzu
guocheng.” See also Hugh Battye’s contribution in this volume.
122 Shawo Tsering recounts that his father was murdered in 1938 by a Nyentok hundred-household head and
some other village notables. Shawo Tsering was coronated as the Tu Commander in 1942, aged nine, but it
seems that he had very little real power. The family had to plow the fields with everyone else. Xiawu Cailang,
Bazong qianhu cangsang, 69.
123 Private communication, locals in Nyentok Village. See also Shawo Tsering’s autobiography, Xiawu Cailang,
Bazong qianhu cangsang.
124 Field, “A Grammar of Tongren Tu,” 10.
125 See, for instance, Xiawu Cailang et al., Bazong qianhu cangsang, 111.
126 I point to the Hui/Salar legends of the founding of Xunhua City as another ironic rebuttal of the Chinese
official stele narratives; see Ma and Ma, Qinghai Huizu minjian gushi jingxuan, 49–53. A different exam-
ple is the Tu tale of Su Wu 苏武, which brilliantly sets the usual nationalistic Chinese story on its head. See
Mair and Bender, Anthology of Chinese Folk Literature, 76–79.
I have emphasized the nitty-gritty of the Ming border wars in this paper because I have not
found parts of it written elsewhere in English, and also because I believe that it is import-
ant. For both Tibetan and Western historians, the central concern of Tibetan historiogra-
phy has always been the long development of Buddhism and Buddhist theocracy in Tibet.
Through this lens, Ming-Tibetan relations become a somewhat dry chronicle of tribute
missions, religious title-granting, and monastic sponsorship between emperors in Beijing
and various Tibetan lamas, often written in the context of politicized contemporary de-
bates over sovereignty. The actual Ming record on the Tibetan plateau, meanwhile, is many
thick volumes-worth of annals, anecdote, and poetry, bulging with secular figures and
events, including chieftains, peoples, immense Völkerwanderungen, raids and sieges, and
expeditions of war and discovery. The central—although certainly not the only—concern
of this Ming record is the protection and stabilization of the Chinese border against the
Tibetan and Mongol steppe. The Repkong Valley was and is a strategic trespass across this
frontier; Sino-Tibetan history was made and continues to be made at Repkong because this
is where Chinese meet Tibetans. In this sense, trans-frontier groups like the Repkong Tu,
the secular history of the Wang family chieftains, and their tales of battling and building
are in fact at the center of Sino-Tibetan relations, not the periphery.
Finally, the history of the Repkong Tu and the Wang family is worth telling in its own
right. Over seven centuries, the Tu have been Mongol, Tibetan, Chinese, and Muslim—not
to mention just Tu. They have been nomads, farmers, traders, soldiers, painters, Confu-
cian officials, Buddhist monks, Daoist thunder mages, and imāms too. Amdo history must
include the Repkong Tu, because the Repkong Tu are the quintessential Amdowas.
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THE FOUR FORTS OF REPKONG A Tu Community

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ARCHIV ORIENTÁLNÍ. SUPPLEMENTA XI.

Prague: Oriental Institute CAS, 2019

Ute Wallenböck, Jarmila Ptáčková, and Bianca Horlemann 9

Peter F. Faggen 107

Ute Wallenböck 133

Hugh Battye 159

Jarmila Ptáčková 187

Adrian Zenz 211

Franz Xaver Erhard 221

Hiroyuki Suzuki and Sonam Wangmo 241

The Four Forts of Repkong:

Unfortunately, the damage to Repkong (Chin. Tongren 同仁) historiography had

The Repkong Tu and the Four Forts

– Ji [Family] Fort / Nyentok (Ji [jia] tun 季/计[家]屯, gNyan thog)

10 Tshe ring skyid, “rKa gsar,” 251–52.

15 Janhunen, Wutun, 11.

A number of studies on the Repkong Tu have been produced in English.19 Of particular

The Repkong Tu and the Ming Conquest of Amdo23

Figure 3: The late Ming border with Amdo (© Hannibal Taubes)

Wang Tingyi 王廷仪 and the “Great Ming” Stele

the route of the Seven Stations thus: “From

century.78 Although this lack of a clear date

76 MSL 1587.5.13/Wanli 15.4 yi chou, ZZSL 2.1138–40.

no doubt Tu as well.91 Nevertheless, the very existence of credible Tibetan sources on

The Execution of Wang Rapten

93 Shoubei 守备, see Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, 433.

115 Anon. gNyan thog gi rus mdzod rags tsam, 9v–10v.

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