How could Tsa Tsas endure for several hundred years while remaining largely intact?
After the Chinese occupation of Tibet from 1950, thousands of stupas were destroyed in search of more valuable items [see illustration above left]. Tsa Tsas were not among these precious items, so they usually remained in place and were sometimes later recovered by Tibetans.
The Chinese occupation of the snow country in the 1950s and the escape of the Dalai Lama to India in 1959 led to a flow of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans primarily to India and Nepal in the years that followed.
As far as possible, the refugees often took religious objects from their household or monastery with them into their exile. None of them thought of selling these artifacts, nor had they ever considered these sacred objects to be of material value at that time. For them, they were simply an integral part of their Buddhist culture. Their primary concern was not to give up this property, a symbol of their former personal Buddhist life, alongside their lost homeland.
By the end of the 1970s, however, commercial interest in Tibetan antiques [including old tsa tsas] began to develop. For the first time, Tibetans were selling to dealers the Buddhist artefacts they had taken with them when they fled their homeland.
| Rubin Museum: Tsa Tsa from the 11th / 12th century |