Christopher I. Beckwith

As unlikely as it may seem given the country's modern image, Tibet was once an expansionistic empire, seeking from about the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the ninth to expand in all directions. Beckwith deals, as the title says, with the Central Asian aspect of this, in what's now northwestern China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, easternmost Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Tibetan entanglements south of the Himalayas are completely ignored, the eastern flank, towards China Proper, is treated only cursorily, and internal Tibetan developments are dealt with only to the extent they impacted imperial designs in the north and west.

The book is a narrative history of military campaigns and diplomatic manoeuvres - there's hardly anything on how the conquered territories were ruled, on how the Tibetan armies were organized, or similar. And given the barrage of unfamiliar geographical names, the book is badly let down by the inadequate maps, which makes those campaigns hard to follow. The Internet isn't too much help here either, as many of the places concerned have different names in different languages and at different times, and the ones Beckwith chose back in the 1980s aren't necessarily the ones you're most likely to find on the Web today.

After five chapters of dry narrative, Beckwith rather incongruously rounds off with an Epilogue that seeks to argue that Tibet and Carolingian Francia were not backwards compared to Tang China, the Caliphate, and Byzantium. A worthy argument, perhaps, but seems like it'd better belong in another book entirely.

I thus found the book rather frustrating - but there, three and a half decades on, seems to be nothing else on offer on the subject.… (altro)