Death of Langdarma and the break-up of the Tibetan Empire

Ralpachen died in 838 — after a long illness, according to the Chinese histories, or murdered by ministers hostile to Buddhism, according to Tibetan tradition — and his brother Darma came to the throne. Later Buddhist historians portray Darma as an enemy of the faith who closed the temples, defrocked the monks and drove out the translators, and call him Langdarma, “Darma the bull”; the Chinese sources describe him as dissolute and cruel and record years of calamity in Tibet — earthquakes, landslides in the Min Mountains, the Tao River flowing backwards for three days, famine and epidemic. Some modern scholars, notably Zuihō Yamaguchi, regard the story of the persecution as largely a later construction; Matthew Kapstein compares it with the Tang persecution of Buddhism in the same years and argues that, whether Darma persecuted the monasteries or merely reduced their support, financial considerations lay behind it.

In 842 Darma died. Tibetan tradition relates that the Buddhist hermit Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje came before the king in disguise and shot him with an arrow, then escaped by turning his black cloak inside out to its white lining and washing the soot from his white horse in a river. The Chinese histories, which learned of the king’s death from Tibetan envoys who reached Chang’an in January 843, say that he died without a son, that a favourite minister and the queen raised her brother’s three-year-old son to the throne, and that the chief minister, who refused to bow to the child, was killed with his whole clan. Tibetan histories speak instead of two princes, Yumtän and Ösung, whose noble backers fought each other; the civil war split central Tibet, and later in the 9th century revolts of subjects swept the country, in which even the royal tombs were plundered.

On the northeastern frontier the general Lun Kongre rose against the new regime, declaring that a king without Tang investiture was no king; he styled himself chief minister and made war on the governor of Shanzhou, Shang Bibi. Their war ravaged Amdo and the Hexi Corridor until about 850; deserted by his followers, Lun Kongre withdrew to Kuozhou, where in 866 he was captured and executed by Tuoba Huaiguang, the officer Shang Bibi had left to hold Shanzhou (according to the New Book of Tang, the Uyghur chief Pugu Jun beheaded him in a great battle with the Tibetans). The Tibetan garrisons in the conquered Chinese lands were left without support, and in 848 Zhang Yichao drove them out of Dunhuang. Descendants of the royal house survived as local rulers — the line of Ösung later founded kingdoms in western Tibet — but no single power united Tibet again until the Mongol conquest in the 13th century. The date 842 agrees with the Chinese record of the king’s death; Tibetan accounts differ widely on the length of his reign.