Dalai Lamas "dolda agenda" (in a good way!)

For three years after the double-handprint decree of 1679 had been announced, when the Fifth had completely withdrawn from public life and knew his end was near, he gave Sangye Gyatso additional instructions: the Regent was to keep his coming death a secret. It was a ruse the Fifth had probably learned from the Bhutanese, who had done the same on the death of their leader, also a lama, thirty-one years earlier.

When the Fifth died in 1682 at the age of sixty-five, Sangye Gyatso duly informed the public that the Dalai Lama was in retreat. On the rare occasions when important visitors were allowed an audience, he enlisted an elderly monk of similar age and appearance to pretend to be the Fifth; the monk wore a large eye-shade, much like the current Dalai Lama, albeit for different reasons.

The deception was so effective that it was fourteen years before the Chinese Emperor realized he had been duped, and then only because some Mongolian prisoners of war mentioned reports they had heard in Lhasa that the Dalai Lama had died more than a decade earlier. By then the next Dalai Lama had been identified, educated, and established: a succession crisis had largely been avoided.