Drogön Chögyal Phagpa
He was also the first Imperial Preceptor of the Yuan dynasty and was concurrently named the director of the Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs,[citation needed] serving during the reign of Kublai Khan.
Historical tradition remembers him as the first vice-ruler of Tibet under the Yuan emperor as well as one of the Five Sakya patriarchs (Tibetan: ས་སྐྱ་གོང་མ་རྣམ་ལྔ་, Wylie: sa skya gong ma rnam lnga).
On the way, they stopped in Lhasa, where Phagpa took the vows of a śrāmaṇera at the Jokhang in front of the statue of the Jowo offered by the Princess Wencheng, the Chinese wife of Songtsen Gampo.
[5] Sakya Pandita preached sermons along his way and arrived at Godan's camp in Liangzhou in 1247, where Mongol troops were exterminating Han Chinese by throwing them in a river.
[6] Sakya Pandita, horrified, gave religious instructions, in particular stressing that killing a sentient being is one of the worst acts according to Buddhism.
[7] In return, Drogon Chogyel Phagpa was supposedly given "temporal authority over the 13 myriarchies [Trikor Chuksum] of Central Tibet.
[9] After the death of Sakya Pandita, the Mongol ruler Möngke Khan dispatched new military campaigns against parts of Tibet in 1252–53.
Phagpa further strengthened his case by defeating his Daoist opponents in a great debate in Kublai's newly built city Kaiping in 1258.
[13] Kublai Khan decided to use the ʼPhags-pa script as the official writing system of the empire, including when he became Emperor of China in 1271, instead of Chinese characters or the Old Uyghur alphabet formerly used for Mongolian.
According to later historiography, Kublai Khan (who founded of the Yuan dynasty in 1271) granted the three cholka or regions of Tibet (Ü-Tsang, Amdo and Kham) to Phagpa as a reward for the initiation in the Buddhist faith.
As mentioned above, Kublai's brother and predecessor Möngke Khan divided Central Tibet into appanages obedient under various Mongol princes in 1251.
[18] In about 1260 the appanage system was withdrawn, and Phagpa, receiving the title State Preceptor (Guoshi), was acknowledged as the supreme head of the Buddhist clergy.
At about the same time, Phagpa was sent from the court to Tibet in order to persuade the local leaders to accept the imposition of Mongol administration.
By this time Central Tibet was divided into 13 trikor, usually rendered in English as "myriarchies", each under a local lord called tripon.
While the later chronicles depict Phagpa and his successors as ruling over the 13 myriarchies and in an extended sense over the three cholka,[25] the authority of the Sakya Trizin was restricted to spiritual affairs.
There was an unsubstantiated rumour that he had been poisoned by the former pönchen Kunga Zangpo, whom he had dismissed some years previously for highhanded conduct.
During the reign of the 14th Sakya Trizin, Lama Dampa Sonam Gyaltsen, the myriarch Tai Situ Changchub Gyaltsen of the Phagmodrupa dynasty began to expand his power in the central province of Ü, marking the "beginning of the end of the period of Sakya power in Central Tibet.
