Inside the "mind's Tibet"
Updated on 28 August 2007
Lindsey Hilsum blogs on modern-day Tibet's ties with China, it's spiritual past and Bob Marley.
Maybe it's the rarified atmosphere at 5000 metres, the lingering perfume of incense smoke or the snow on the distant mountains in August but Tibet is somewhere outsiders like to project their fantasies.
The Chinese Government cites a dubious historical record to prove that it has the right to govern the territory against the will of many of its people. The "Free Tibet" community of exiles, activists, Hollywood stars and post-hippie dharma bums conjures a romantic image of a land of other-worldly peace-loving Buddhists, innocent victims of the cruel Han Chinese.
A brief reading of history disproves much of this. The Tibetan government-in-exile's claim to parts of three Chinese provinces with Tibetan minorities alongside Tibet proper and neighbouring Qinghai is fanciful; the Chinese government's dismissal of pre-1951 Tibet as "feudal" and its people as "backward", is arrogant and insulting.
The Chinese have not always ruled Tibet, and - whatever the Free Tibeters say - Tibetans have historically used violence to fight for land and power, just like the Manchus, Mongols, Han and dozens of other groups whose conflicts shaped present-day China.
During the few days I spent in Tibet in mid August, I found myself being wrenched between these visions. In his wonderful book "Tibet, Tibet", Patrick French tries to trace a line from the British poet Henry Newbolt who referred to "the mind's Tibet." I like that idea - that somehow, for outsiders, Tibet is a state of mind not a real place.
But of course Tibet is very real for those who live there. Many Tibetans are poor, and there is much dispute about who is benefitting from the current economic boom.
Outside the Jokhang Temple, the paraphernalia of Buddhism (white scarves known as hadas, prayer flags, prayer wheels, thangkas) are sold to tourists at absurdly high prices, and it's not clear who is profiting - the Tibetans who often own the shops, or the Hui Muslim or Han Chinese incomers who usually control the business.
Tibetan monk becomes Channel 4 News latest cameraman.
All evidence is that the Chinese government controls Tibet with a firm hand - there is little or no physical resistance. Yet, while foreign journalists based in Beijing travel freely elsewhere in China, the Foreign Ministry imposed a minder on us in Tibet. Ours was a pleasant young woman who clearly feared getting into trouble, so called her boss on the mobile phone every time we tried to film anything.
When I asked a senior Communist Party official why they insisted on watching our every move, he told me it was because of the altitude - it was for our own safety.
For some reason, the million and a half tourists and businesspeople who visited Tibet last year do not require such protection.
The new railway, which was completed last August, is bringing in tens of thousands of Han Chinese, who stand alongside Germans and Americans snapping pictures of pilgrims prostrating themselves infront of the Jokhang. Many Chinese seem to feel that Tibetans have a certain spiritual energy lacking in their own society.
More than thirty years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, increasing numbers of Chinese crave religious meaning. Even while the People's Liberation Army and the Red Guards were trashing temples, destroying sacred objects and torturing monks, few Tibetans lost their faith.
Keeping the faith
We had the good fortune to be in Lhasa for the annual Yoghurt Festival, when monks and pilgrims unfurl a giant cloth picture or thangkha of the Buddha on a hill above the Tibetan capital.
(Incidentally, I can testify that not all monks practice non-violence - when we tried to set our camera up to film from a particularly good spot in a monastery garden, a maroon-and-saffron robed monk lobbed a rock at us to see us off the property!) Thousands of tourists joined the faithful, but there was no doubting the devotion of those pilgrims who scrambled up the hill before dawn for the ceremony.
On the train from Lhasa, we met three elderly Tibetan women going to visit the great Buddhist monastery at Xining, in the neighbouring province of Qinghai. As retired civil servants, they said that during their working lives they had not gone on pilgrimages or regularly walked clockwise round the sacred sites as Buddhism demands. But now religion is no longer taboo, and they're no longer constrained by government jobs, they have picked up where they left off.
"While I was in Tibet the words of Bob Marley's Redemption Song were echoing around my head"
In Qinghai, where we did not have a government minder, we met Tibetans who openly wore Dalai Lama badges or put up pictures of the Dalai Lama, in defiance of the Chinese Government. They were not about to challenge the Communist Party or fight for independence, but they continued to follow their leader, who the Chinese condemn as a "splittist".
While I was in Tibet the words of Bob Marley's Redemption Song were echoing around my head: "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves shall free our minds." History has happened, it's a done deal, and I see no way Tibet will break loose of China. But no-one has colonised the minds of those old ladies spinning their prayer wheels as they circumambulate the Jokhang Temple, nor the former herdsman who proudly puts up his poster of the Dalai Lama.
Maybe it's my fantasy of Tibet, but I think they themselves have freed their minds.
