Changing Relations 21
division of the population into people belonging to military units and peo-
ple belonging to civil units. Monks were not excluded; even temple peasants
became ‘military’ citizens in case the temple they were affiliated to belonged to
the area of a military unit. Chinese officials were appointed into the ‘ministe-
rial aristocracy’, which was distinguished through the possession of an insignia
of rank. Nonetheless, Tibetan officials always were in a superior position—
even if a Chinese official may have had received a higher insignia of rank.4
People belonging to the military units, apart from paying taxes, had to per-
form corvé (official duty, Tib. rje blas)5 which included recruitment as soldiers.
In the process of establishing the administrative system they were further
divided into three units of a thousand families (Tib. stong sde) which were
subdivided into ten subunits (called in Tibetan tshan) and—probably at a
later date when a land reform was conducted—into the smallest unit (crew,
called in Tibetan rkya). This last unit consisted only of 5–6 men (roughly the
adult men of two families). From these units soldiers were recruited.6 This was
probably done to make sure that farming was not disturbed (if one member of
a family had to go away on duty, the others could do his work). The members
of the military units were tibetanised to a certain degree; they even took on
Tibetan given names.
The civil units were divided into three as well and subdivided into subu-
nits which were known by the Chinese term jiang (將 the Chinese equivalent
to the abovementioned Tibetan tshan). But these jiang units were subdivided
4 See Dotson, Brandon, “Divination and Law in the Tibetan Empire,” in Contributions to the
Cultural History of Early Tibet, ed. Matthew Kapstein and Brandon Dotson (Leiden: Brill,
2007), 8.
5 Tib. rje blas has been identified as ‘official work/official duty’ by Takeuchi in Takeuchi,
Tsuguhito, Old Tibetan Contracts from Central Asia (Tokyo: Daizo Shuppan, 1995), 266. This
identification is accepted and linguistically verified by Zeisler and Uebach (Uebach, Helga
and Zeisler, Bettina, “Rje-blas, pha-los and other Compounds with Suffix-s in Old Tibetan
Texts,” in Chomolangma, Demawend und Kasbek: Festschrift für Roland Bielmeier, ed. Brigitte
Huber. et al. (Halle: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2008), 310.
The Tibetan term rje blas is different from the English term corvé in that it is also applied
to persons of the higher strata of society who received an official post as their rje blas. See
also Taenzer, Gertraud, The Dunhuang Region during Tibetan Rule: A Study of the Secular
Manuscripts Discovered at the Mogao Caves (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012), 240 for an
extensive explanation.
6 It is stated in Ms. IOL Tib J 740 part II line 332 (transliterated in OTDO and transliterated and
partly translated in: Dotson, “Divination and Law”) that soldiers were recruited per crew (Tib.
rkya). A discussion of this term is found in Taenzer, The Dunhuang Region during Tibetan
Rule, 402.