A Stranger in My Native Land

In the second of his two-part series on travels inside Tibet Tenzig Sonam, a Tibetan poet and film-maker currently living in New York, enters Lhasa, the capital, and finds that none of it is as he had imagined it growing up in exile in India.

It is early afternoon when we enter the broad Lhasa Valley. At the outskirts of the city, the highway becomes a wide boulevard, its verges neatly fenced and landscaped. I have no illusions about Lhasa -- I know the Chinese have transformed it beyond recognition -- but even so, I can barely contain my excitement. Every Tibetan, old or young, in Tibet or in exile, yearns to visit Lhasa; it is our Mecca, the focus of our identity as Tibetans, and its over-whelming physical symbol is the Potala Palace whose familiar outlines are etched into our psyches like the subliminal imprint of our origins. I strain to catch my first glimpse of the Potala, but all I can see is block after block of modern houses, clinical and characterless, their signs mostly in Chinese. The first and most depressing truth about Lhasa hits me like a blow between the eyes; it has been reduced to just another, provincial Chinese city. We drive past a roundabout which encloses a travesty of a public monument -- two giant, golden yaks posing heroically in a posture that only Communists could imagine -- and suddenly we are released into a vast, empty, concrete square, and here, towering above us, is the Potala itself.

The palace is enormous, larger than any picture could ever convey, and it is breathtakingly magnificent, undiminished in impact despite its iconic familiarity. It seems to have magically evolved out of the hard escarpment -- an organic unity of form and colour, massively solid and yet exuding a sense of lightness, like a giant ocean liner straining to break loose from its moorings. Once, the historic village of Shol lay at its foot, but only recently most of it was bulldozed to make way for this broad, soulless plaza. Street-lights shaped like kitsch chandeliers line the brand new boulevard that traverses the square and leads into the heart of what remains of the old city.

The Yak Hotel is situated on the busy Beijing Shar Lam in the old quarter of Lhasa. The street is crowded with shops, restaurants and karaoke bars, and threaded by small alleyways that lead into mysterious recesses. Cycle-rickshaws with bright, Tibetan-style canopies ply the street, and on this one stretch Tibetans seem to be in the majority. A side street near the hotel leads to the Jokhang temple, Tibet's holiest shrine. The square in front is a heaving, surging mass of humanity, an exhilarating conflation of motion and colour and sound. For a moment we just stand there, the crowds eddying past us, our senses reeling under this onslaught of visual and aural stimuli, my mind stunned by a profusion of conflicting emotions -- joy, amazement, sorrow. Stalls selling trinkets of every description disappear into the Barkhor, the narrow souk-like marketplace that circumscribes the temple complex. Pilgrims and traders from every corner of Tibet, represented in a bewildering array of costumes and hairstyles, lend a festive touch. Here, one can still catch a glimpse of the old Tibet, precariously preserved, like an oasis in the middle of an encroaching wasteland.

In the small courtyard in front of the temple entrance, pilgrims make full-length prostrations, the flagstones dark and glistening, polished by the ceaseless sweep of their bodies. We enter the temple, following the beacon of flickering butter lamps held aloft by the faithful, lulled into a reverie by the continuous drone of murmured prayers and the smell and aura of sanctity that smothers us like a gentle, blinding fog. Swept along by the measured shuffle of the crowd, we enter the sanctum sanctorum, aglow in the golden wash of giant butter-lamps. We look up at the Jowo Rinpoche, Tibet's most venerated Buddha image, swathed in khatas -- the white scarves that symbolise respect and goodwill -- his face incandescent and compassionate; a shiver runs down my spine. The throng of people push us along, around the statue and out. We wander as in a dream through the maze-like interior of the temple, along corridors where shafts of light paint passing pilgrims in medieval chiaroscuro. We make our offerings at the multitude of shrines that lead one into the next until we seem to merge into the substance of the place itself, becoming a part of a continuum that seems to stretch back to some ancient and unremembered past. Perhaps this is the essence of Tibet, its elusive genius locus, this alchemic concoction of magic, tradition, faith and spirituality.

We find a steep staircase that delivers us, blinking and dazed, into the blinding sunlight of the rooftop. Everything seems silent, then the hum and bustle of the city intrudes and the spell is broken. Rinu points out to me that we are standing on the exact spot from which a Chinese police videographer shot some of the harrowing scenes of police brutality against unarmed monks here inside the Jokhang during the pro-independence demonstrations of March 1988. That footage was smuggled out of Tibet and the more graphic scenes were subsequently broadcast throughout the world. One particular image leaps to my mind -- less publicised because the scene it depicts is so fleeting: a plainclothes officer in trade-mark leather jacket is standing in the shadows -- perhaps right there on that level below us -- surveying the mad scramble of panicked monks as they are chased and beaten up by uniformed policemen armed with batons; suddenly, he launches into a vicious kung fu-style kick at an unfortunate monk who strays too close to him and then, having made crunching contact, coolly withdraws into the fringes of the action, as if that premeditated burst of violence was merely routine target practice, as if the monks running helter-skelter in blind terror were no better than animals.

We walk across the roof terraces. All that terror and mindless violence seems far away. A group of young monks are huddled together in the courtyard below us. One gets up, laughing, and runs away; the others chase him in boyish excitement. In the distance, the Patala Palace looms like a sombre shipwreck beached on the shores of an alien city.

Lhasa is a microcosm of the effects of four decades of Chinese rule in Tibet. Walking around it is to see a city violated and brutalised beyond belief. And yet, this systematic deconstruction of the history and culture of an ancient civilisation is taking place utterly brazenly, without even the pretence of subtlety or subterfuge. Thus, the blurb on the ticket to enter the Potala Palace ascribes its construction to the seventh-century Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo and makes no mention of the Fifth Dalai Lama during whose reign, a thousand years later, the major part of the palace was built, and nor does it allude to the fact that until 1959 the palace was the residence of the Dalai Lamas. The tickets to visit Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's summer palace, contemptuously refer to it as Luo Bu Lin Ka. Newscasters on Lhasa Television are made to read Tibetan in the nasal, whining tones of Mandarin Chinese, perverting the language beyond recognition. And while the city expands and preens its glass and concrete achievements, the Tibetans themselves are ghettoized into the confines of the old city, useful only as adjuncts in the sanitised reduction of Tibetan culture into a tourist attraction.

Within living memory Lhasa was an entirely Tibetan city, the spiritual beacon for a civilisation that stretched from the Himalayan kingdoms to the steppes of Mongolia. In 1950, when the first troops of the People's Liberation Army entered Lhasa, there were perhaps a handful of Chinese here -- mostly traders and businessmen. Today, at every level, Lhasa is dominated by the Chinese and the Tibetans are a minority, strangers in their own city.