In 1948, Life magazine ran one of its rare colour issues featuring the photos of a nine-year old would-be Panchen Lama at the Kumbum lamasery in Qinghai.
The boy photographed by Mark Kauffman for LIFE in July of the previous year was Choekyi Gyaltsen (1938–1989), the future 10th Panchen Lama.
As part of his assignment, Kauffman took a large number of photos of Kumbum monastery, only a few of which made it into Life magazine. The others are online, in black and white, and I have colourised them to bring them to life. They provide a superb record of Kumbum as it was just before the Communist takeover of Qinghai and the place was wrecked during the Cultural Revolution.
Now rebuilt, Kumbum (Taersi) is again one of the most important monasteries in Tibetan Buddhism. I took quite a few photos myself when I visited a decade ago.
Disclaimer: as with all the colourised photos on this substack account, they are taken from B&W originals, and processed with an AI app to colourise them. I have manipulated the images manually in Photoshop to enhance exposure, contrast etc to bring out the details and remove blemishes etc. The AI processing will sometime ‘hallucinate’ to fill in small details (eg creating nonsense Chinese character squiggles) where they are blurred in the original image.
At the time his status was still disputed: followers of the Ninth Panchen Lama had identified him as the reincarnation, but the Tibetan government in Lhasa had not yet accepted him.
Backed by the Chinese Nationalist government and Qinghai Muslim warlord/governor Ma Bufang, he was enthroned at Kumbum Monastery in 1949.
After the Communist takeover he and his entourage accommodated themselves to the new regime, and in 1951 the Dalai Lama formally recognised him. He subsequently moved to Tashilhunpo Monastery at Shigatse and became one of the most prominent Tibetan figures cooperating with Beijing.
That cooperation with the Communist Chinese government eventually broke down dramatically. After travelling through Tibetan areas and witnessing the consequences of the Great Leap Forward and Communist political campaigns, the 24-year-old Panchen Lama wrote his extraordinary 70,000 Character Petition in 1962. Addressed to Zhou Enlai and the Chinese leadership, it documented famine, mass arrests, the destruction of monasteries and the suppression of Tibetan religion and culture, and became one of the most important internal criticisms ever made of Chinese policy in Tibet.
Mao reportedly described it as a “poisoned arrow” aimed at the Party. The Panchen Lama was subsequently denounced, subjected to public struggle sessions and imprisoned for many years. He was released in the late 1970s and rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping, thereafter using his restored position to encourage the rebuilding of Tibetan monasteries, religious education and culture.
In January 1989, the Panchen Lama returned to Shigatse for ceremonies at Tashilhunpo and again spoke critically about the destruction inflicted on Tibet during the preceding decades.
On 28 January 1989 he died suddenly, aged 50, officially from a heart attack. The timing generated persistent rumours that he had been poisoned, although no convincing evidence has established that he was assassinated.
His death produced the continuing dispute over his reincarnation: in 1995 the Dalai Lama recognised six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th Panchen Lama; Chinese authorities rejected the choice and installed Gyaincain Norbu instead.
Thus the rather solemn ten-year-old photographed by Kauffman in 1948 went on to become one of the most important—and tragic—Tibetan political and religious figures of the twentieth century.
Kumbum monastery
Kumbum monastery 1947 and 2017 (below)
Kumbum monastery
Mark Kauffman was an American photojournalist who started his career in Los Angeles, where he worked on LIFE magazine covering Hollywood. He served as a Marine Corps combat photographer during the Second World War, including a stint on Iwo Jima.
Returning to LIFE as a staff photographer, 1946–47 he was assigned to the Far East and travelled extensively through China during the Civil War, photographing everything from Nationalist troops and Shanghai street life to remote Qinghai
Kauffman subsequently made a significant career in sports photography in the US. Henry Luce chose him to help launch Sports Illustrated in 1954. Over a roughly thirty-year career he shot more than twenty LIFE covers, won major photographic awards, later served as director of photography at Playboy, and finally taught photography at California Polytechnic State University. He died in California in 1994.
To be continued with more colour photos in Part 2.