Controversial Guimet Museum acquires important Tibetan statue of the fifth Dalai Lama

On November 27th 2024, the Guimet Museum announced the acquisition of a rare, seventeenth-century statue of the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (ངག་དབང་བློ་བཟང་རྒྱ་མཚོ།). It is one of the few statues in private ownership that can be directly traced back to its origins in the Potala Palace, and comes from a time that was essential to both the institute of the Dalai Lama and Tibet. The acquisition of the statue must be seen from a broader perspective of dispossessed heritage and erasure of Tibetan culture. The Guimet Museum has willingly participated in the latter, replacing the name ‘Tibet’ with ‘Himalayan world’ in the exhibition previously labelled as ‘Nepal-Tibet’. While this specific statue does not seem to be of stolen origin, colonial practices do not only pertain to the celebration of looted treasure. With the Guimet Museum continuing to expand their Tibetan collection, we urge them to stop erasing Tibet’s cultural heritage and reverse the labelling of Tibetan items as ‘Himalayan world’.


The newly-acquired statue of the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (Guimet Museum via Facebook)

The statue depicts the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso. The fifth Dalai Lama was the first Dalai Lama to wield both political and religious power in Tibet, doing so in a manner that earned him the name ‘the Great Fifth’. He is credited with unifying Tibet, starting the Ganden Phodrang government at the Potala Palace (the construction of which he had initiated himself).

A partially-faded inscription in Tibetan can be seen at the back of the statue, which has been translated by Ariane MacDonald, Dagpo Rinpoche (དྭགས་པོ་རིན་པོ་ཆེ།) and Yonten Gyatso (མདོ་སྨད་པ་ཡོན་ཏན་རྒྱ་མཚོ།) as:

“That by spreading this statue of Ngag-gi dbang phyug blo-bzang rgya-mtsho
By (the organisation or person whose name ends with) khang-gsar,
May his affection not be dissociated from us, and may his reincarnation be quickly born.”

 

The inscription indicates that the statue has been conceived after the passing of the fifth Dalai Lama, but before the eventual recognition of the sixth Dalai Lama. This was a particularly sensitive time for the newly-formed Ganden Phodrang, which kept the passing of the fifth Dalai Lama secret to ensure a stable government. The maker of the statue must thus have been part of the select few that did know of the highly-guarded secret, which puts them within the inner ranks. One of the rumoured sculptors is Sangye Gyatso (སྡེ་སྲིད་སངས་རྒྱས་རྒྱ་མཚོ།), the then-regent who took charge after the Dalai Lama’s passing and who was a skilled artist himself. The statue has been made using modelled raw earth, earth so pure that an attempt at dating the statue using a thermoluminescence process failed due to a lack of impurities.

Tibetan art has been subject to many lootings, such as the systematic pillaging by the British Empire during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘Great Game’. These lootings have contributed to the ‘othering’ of Tibet, ultimately leading to the mystification and the dehumanisation of the Tibetan people and their plight for human rights. To this day, colonial practices persist inside Tibet, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) actively dispossessing the Tibetan people of their art and culture – described by Prof. Clare Harris as ‘doubly colonial’. It is for these reasons that modern-day acquisitions of Tibetan heritage, such as this statue of the fifth Dalai Lama, must be scrutinised. In this case, the statue used to be kept at the Potala in the possession of the Ganden Phodrang. Eventually art dealer Jean-Luc Estournel would gain possession of the statue. According to him, the statue was gifted in 1920/21 by the thirteenth Dalai Lama to David MacDonald, a British officer who gave shelter to the thirteenth Dalai Lama and his ministers on their escape to British India in 1910. MacDonald apparently sold it to some Tibetologists in Darjeeling in 1959, who would in turn sell it to Estournel in 1980 (per Estournel himself). While only the gifting of a white ceremonial scarf is mentioned in the autobiography of MacDonald, it does seem plausible that the officer received more valuable gifts due to the close and frequent nature of his meetings with the Dalai Lama. Estournel would keep the statue until the acquisition by the Guimet Museum announced in late 2024.


Tibetans and Tibet supporters protest in front of the Guimet Museum, September 21

The Guimet Museum has recently come under fire for being complicit in the erasure of Tibet and its cultural heritage. The museum has renamed its exhibition from ‘Nepal-Tibet’ to ‘Himalayan world’, removed ‘Tibet’ from biographies such as that of Alexandra David Néel, while any mention of ‘Tibet’ is avoided in its current Tang China exhibition. Instead, it is consistently referred to as Tubo, a name that only appears in Chinese medieval texts for dealing with the Tibetan Empire (the name used in English texts). This fits within a larger, systematic effort by the CCP to rewrite history and erase the Tibetan identity and culture. This effort is not only concentrated within Tibet and China but also affects other countries, as evidenced by the influencing through the Confucius institutes set up on many university campuses. More than 140 Tibet advocacy groups have called on the museum to revert the scrubbing of Tibet’s name, and a group of 27 researchers have condemned the Guimet Museum and the Quai Branly Museum of Indigenous art for staying passive in the face of Chinese interference. While the Quai Branly Museum reverted their similar removal of Tibet’s name, the director of the Guimet Museum, Dr. Yannick Lintz, refused to do so.

The Guimet Museum’s refusal is in stark contrast to the current discourse among museums, which centres on the adoption of decolonial practice, such as collaborative curation with source communities, repatriation and restitution efforts to address their colonial legacies.

Both Tibet scholars and Tibetan community representatives have expressed their grave concern on the mislabelling practices within the Guimet Museum. Its refusal is strikingly off-course for the Guimet Museum, as their stance ultimately validates the CCP’s false narrative, undermining Tibet’s historical and cultural distinctiveness. Any intent on educating the French audience or on displaying the Tibetan heritage in a manner faithful to the Tibetan community seems to be lost, which calls into question whom the Guimet Museum’s ownership of the Tibetan objects is really serving.

With the Guimet Museum acquiring Tibetan heritage such as this statue of the fifth Dalai Lama, it has the responsibility to engage in a sustainable and equitable way with its objects and its visitors. Founder Émile Guimet himself envisioned ‘a museum that thinks, speaks and lives’, not a museum that censors itself and erases Tibetan heritage. We call on the Guimet Museum and its director, Dr. Yannick Lintz, to revert the erasure of ‘Tibet’ in its collections by relabelling Tibetan culture as such and to engage in meaningful dialogue with Tibetan scholars and community representatives to ensure a faithful and accurate representation of Tibetan heritage in the Guimet Museum. May the Guimet Museum be a museum for all of Asia’s diversity, not just for the CCP-approved.