The Treasury of Lives

Pelgon Trinle Rabten (dpal mgon 'phrin las rab brtan), the last king of the Meu kingdom, was born in 1916 in Ngawa. His mother, queen Pelchen Dondrub Tso (dpal chen don grub mtsho), ruled the kingdom until Rabten came of age.

The Meu kingdom was an independent polity in the modern-day Amdo Ngawa from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It ruled much of the middle and lower Ngawa, a dominion the size of Austria. Around 1760, Tsewang Kyab (tshe dbang khyab), the first king of the Meu kingdom, conquered Ngawa's surrounding regions and expanded the kingdom. The king invited the Fifth Kirti Rinpoche, Lobzang Tenpai Gyeltsen (kirti 05 blo bzang bstan pa'i rgyal mtshan, 1712–1771), to his palace to perform certain rituals, during which time the Kirti Rinpoche appointed Lha Chenpo (lha chen po, Skt. Mahadeva) as the personal protector deity of the Meu kingdom and Dardzom Takri Dradil (dar 'dzom stag ri dgra 'dul) as the mountain deity of the region. He also composed a sacrificial ritual text for the king. Since then the Kirti lineages and the Meu kingdom established a preceptor-patron relationship, and the Kirti hierarchs became the main religious instructors of the Meu kings and queens. A later king, Chaktar Bum (lcags thar 'bum), invited the Eighth Kirti Rinpoche, Lobzang Trinle (kirti 08 blo bzang 'phrin las, 1849–1904), to establish a new Kirti Monastery (kirti dgon) in 1870 in Ngawa with support from neighboring chieftains of Golok Akhyung, Choktse, and Washul. It served as a branch of Taktsang Lhamo Kirti (stag tshang lha mo kir+ti dgon).

In the late nineteenth century, at its military height and during the reign of Rabten's father, Zhangkyong Gyelpo (zhang skyong rgyal po), neighboring polities like Golok Pema, Washul Serta, and Zorge surrendered to the Meu kingdom and paid allegiance in the form of yearly tributes.

Unlike his father, Rabten resolved to maintain a policy of peaceful coexistence with neighboring polities. His popularity and patronage for religious activities earned him the epithet "religious king" (chos rgyal), and he strengthened the ecumenical environment of Meu—there were at least eighteen different monasteries under the Meu kingdom, which belonged to Geluk, Sakya, Nyingma, and Jonang traditions, and as well as Bon.

In the first decade of Pelgon Trinle Rabten's reign, a period of relative peace, his influence in southern Amdo increased and the tsowas (tsho ba), or communities under Meu prospered. Rabten and the kingdom played a major role in the economic development of the region. The kingdom owned five commercial units; each with over a hundred head of dzos for transporting goods. The businessmen of the kingdom engaged in the trade of tea, antlers, jewelries, musk, dairy products, and so forth. They traveled between trading centers like Barkham, Xining, Dartsedo, and Chengdu. The entrepreneurial environment created by the Meu Gyelpo had a huge impact on the future of Ngawa's economic life as it flourished and the tradition of long-distance trade by Ngawa businessmen expanded all across the Tibetan plateau and even into South Asia.

The subjects of the kingdom were both pastoralists and agriculturalists, and therefore, taxes were paid in the form of dairy products, animals, and wheat. The Meu kingdom is known for its fairly progressive taxation system that was based on each household's relative wealth and size. Western missionaries like Robert Ekvall (1898-1978) and Robert Carlson (1928-2019) who were stationed on the Sino-Tibetan borderlands not only took note of the high literacy of non-clerical Tibetans in the Meu kingdom, but also made panegyrical remarks on how the Meu kingdom had prohibited banditry, and therefore unlike other Tibetan borderland regions, it was safe to travel through Ngawa. The relative security from brigands in Ngawa is also expressed by the epithet: "the land of gold-carrying lady" (rgan mo gser khur ma'i sa cha).

Despite his young age, Rabten was a pragmatic thinker when it came to his diplomacy with the Chinese. In the 1920s and 30s, while much of northern Amdo was embroiled in war and conflict with Muslim warlords, he struck an alliance with Ma Bufang (馬步芳 1903-1975) of Gansu. Still, Rabten received refugees who fled the war and violence in northern Amdo. When his former generals based in Meruma (lower Ngawa) resisted communist designs in 1956, in light of previous defeats and the military power of the adversary, Rabten attempted to negotiate and work with the Chinese.

After the communist victory in 1949, like many local chieftains and kings in eastern Tibet, Rabten was appointed as a representative member of Ngawa Autonomous Prefecture in the National General Assembly, PRC. The dissolution of traditional Tibetan political structures was a gradual process of integration which began in the early 1950s by installing traditional local leaders and elites into the Chinese administrative structures. The earliest form of Ngawa Autonomous Prefecture was established in 1951 with Barkham as the prefectural capital. Following his appointment in the National General Assembly as a representative of Ngawa Autonomous Prefecture, Rabten attended the National General Assembly meeting in Beijing in 1954, during which he met with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (ta la'i bla ma 14 bstan 'dzin rgya mtsho, b. 1935), the Tenth Paṇchen Lama, Chokyi Gyatso (P1650 paN chen bla ma 10 chos skyi rgya mtsho, 1938-1989), and other eastern Tibetan leaders like Apa Alo (a pha a blo, 1904-1997) and the Chone Gyelpo, Pema Wangchuk (co ne rgyal po padma dbang phyug, b. 1929).

Later, in 1956, Rabten attended the preparatory committee meeting for Tibetan Autonomous Region in Lhasa. He met with the Dalai Lama several times and had extensive discussions on the future of Tibet and Tibetans in his kingdom during his stay in Lhasa.

In a drastic turn of events in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Rabten was targeted as a relic of the old society—a figure of a class enemy—to be eliminated. Among other things, he was pressed to criticize and condemn the Dalai Lama and the "feudal" kingdom he had ruled in Amdo. When he refused to do so, he was even more threatened. Then, when his wife, the queen Tashi Dolma (bkra shis sgrol ma) mysteriously disappeared, the king was devastated. It is believed that Pelgon Trinle Rabten committed suicide by jumping in the river at Tritsang (khri tshang; Ch. Wenchuan) in 1966. He was fifty. His family members were persecuted as class enemies and sent to rural reeducation camps.