June 12th the U.S. Congress passed the Resolve Tibet Act, quote:

to enhance U.S. support for Tibet and promote dialogue between the People’s Republic of China and the Dalai Lama toward a peaceful resolution of the long-standing dispute between Tibet and China.

End quote.

I can’t find any confirmation that the president has signed the Act. Whether he has or not, on June 19th a posse of seven members of the House of Representatives called on the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, at his exile home in India.

It’s a nice gesture, I guess, and the ChiComs’ treatment of Tibet and its people has certainly been atrocious; but the only effect of this Act so far has been to annoy the ChiCom bosses.

They vented their annoyance in a letter to the congressfolk. The letter refers to Tibet as, quote: ”an integral part of Chinese territory since [the] Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century,” end quote.

Really? The dates usually given for the Yuan Dynasty are 1271 to 1368 A.D. Pulling down Herrmann’s Historical Atlas of China from my bookshelf, I see on page 43 that Tibet and China were indeed under a single rule in 1290 A.D.

It wasn’t Chinese rule, though. The title of that page is ”Asia Under the Mongols.”

Pictures are from the 1935 edition at Archive.org, and vary slightly from the one on the Derbyshire shelves, but the Asia of 1290 and 1368 didn’t change in the intervening years.

The Mongols had conquered China and also Tibet. In 1368 the Chinese brought down the Mongol rulers and established the Ming Dynasty under Chinese rule. Tibet got her independence back, and is shown thus on page 47, headed ”Asia During the Ming Dynasty.”

If the ChiComs really want to restore the status quo ante to what it was in the 13th century, they should hand over China to the Mongols.