What year marked the end of the Chinese 'Ming' Dynasty?
Sino-Tibetan relations during the Ming dynasty dominate the rival religious sects in Tibet. Meanwhile, the Chinese Ming dynasty fell to the rebellion of Li Zicheng (1606–1645) in 1644, yet his short-lived Shun dynasty was crushed by the Manchu invasion and the Han Chinese general Wu Sangui (1612–1678). "China Daily" states that when the following Qing dynasty replaced the Ming dynasty, it merely "strengthened administration of Tibet." However, Kolmaš states that the Dalai Lama was very observant of what was going on in China and accepted a Manchu invitation in 1640 to send envoys to their capital at Mukden in 1642, before the Ming collapsed. Dawa Norbu,
History of the Ming dynasty part of the Kingdom of Dali, which was annihilated by the Mongols in the 1250s and became established as the Yunnan Province under Yuan dynasty later on. By the end of the 14th century, some 200,000 military colonists settled some 2,000,000 "mu" (350,000 acres) of land in what is now Yunnan and Guizhou. Roughly half a million more Chinese settlers came in later periods; these migrations caused a major shift in the ethnic make-up of the region, since more than half of the roughly 3,000,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the Ming dynasty were non-Han peoples. In this region, the