In search of Taiwan's Tibetan monastery

On July 21, 1985, the center of power in Taiwan at the time, Taipei's Chungshan Hall (台北中山堂), hosted one of the most impressive religious meetings in its history.

The late Ku Cheng-kang (谷正綱), a staunchly anti-communist political protege of presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), was then serving as chairman of the Chinese Refugees Relief Association (CRRA, 中國災胞救助總會), and gathered a number of influential political and social celebrities to the meeting.

The CRRA was the official agency dealing with affairs concerning Chinese (including Tibetan) refugees from China. It hoped to build a grand Tibetan monastery (西藏佛寺) in Taiwan to resemble the Potala Palace in Lhasa, with the aim of winning the hearts of "Tibetan compatriots" in exile and their sympathizers worldwide.

How to manipulate Tibetan politics in Taiwan's favor had always been a hotly-debated and sticky issue for the KMT government.

Although the KMT repeatedly proclaimed Tibet to be "an integral part of the Republic of China," adopting the same stance as its communist antagonist in Beijing, few Tibetans, exiled or not, agreed with this Chinese stance.

Ku, nicknamed the "anti-Communist Godfather," was a hard-line supporter of the KMT's unification policies and planned to set up a Tibetan power center in Taipei to compete with that of the exiled Dalai Lama in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala. A Tibetan monastery in Taipei, it was thought, would serve his purpose well.

Another important figure involved with the scheme was the head of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC, 蒙藏委員會),Tung Shu-fan (董樹藩). The late Tung was in fact the driving force behind the plan, although he appears to have had rather different ideas from Ku.

Luring the Tibetans

Tung believed that, with the construction of a great monastery outside Tibet, the KMT would be able to come to terms with the Dalai Lama and, he hoped, lure him one day to Taiwan to turn the monastery into a center of worship for the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora.

Besides Ku and Tung, also present at this rare religious event, were Minister of the Interior Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄), Legislator Lin Yu-hsiang (林鈺祥), Control Yuan member Lee Shen-yi (李伸一) and the chairman of the Chinese Han-Tibet Culture Association (中華漢藏文化協會理事長) Master Hsing Yun (星雲法師).

Ku was elected chairman of the Tibetan Monastery Construction Committee and stated that the CRRA had agreed to offer 5,000 ping (approximately 16,000m2) of its own land at Wuchih Mountain (五指山) in Neihu, Taipei, to build the monastery.

Wu was elected vice-chairman of the committee.

Tung served as executive vice-chairman to work with Master Hsing Yun on fund-raising, with 18 others elected as standing committee members to oversee construction.

Sixteen years have passed and nothing seems to have come out of that religious gathering. A beautiful sketch map of the Tibetan Monastery, with a full report on the proceedings of the meeting, did, however, appear in the first issue (August 1985) of a now out-of-print magazine called Friends of Tibet (西藏之友), an official MTAC publication.

What went wrong with this apparently guaranteed construction project? More importantly, what happened to the construction funds?

According to Lee Hung-lieh (李鴻烈), the project's liaison officer and former director of the Tibetan Department of the MTAC, the Chinese Han-Tibet Culture Association, under the MTAC and chaired by Master Hsing Yun, was responsible for all fund-raising after Tung died from a sudden stroke in 1986, soon after the original meeting.