5/25/24: Onto Lhasa, Tibet: Some Background

After some great, fast-paced days exploring Shanghai, Steven and I were off to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, a place that he had been wanting to visit for as long as I could remember. Like so many people who had to cancel travel plans during Covid, our four-month trip to Tibet, a chunk of Asia, and a large swath through the Middle East had to be cut way short after just two weeks in Sri Lanka and India's Kochi area. Even with a few medical bumps since then, we'd hoped to finally reach Tibet one day and here we were! 

If you've ever looked into traveling to the Tibet Autonomous Region, you know first-hand it's not like so many other places where you simply obtain a visa on arrival and call it a day. A valid Chinese visa doesn't work either. Anyone wishing to tour Tibet has to secure a permit from the Tibet Tourism Bureau (TTB) but to get that, a tour must be booked for the entire stay. For the permit, we needed to submit a detailed itinerary of where we wanted to visit in Tibet, agree to be escorted by a guide (a minder, we wondered) the entire time, and arrange with the hotel in Shanghai to pick up the TTB permit. No permit would mean no onward flight!

Unlike other countries where we've had tours, the agency that arranged our permit was legally responsible for us the entire time we were in the region. We only found out when we were dropped off at the airport in Lhasa for our onward flight to Chengdu in China that our driver was Chinese. It did make me wonder whether we had been "minded" the whole time we'd been in his company and whether he didn't understand a word of English as he let on. In the upcoming posts on Tibet, I'll speak more about my impressions of the police presence we encountered.

Coming out of the clouds from the Himalayas, we spotted the Nyainqêntanglha Mountains of southern Tibet as we approached the Lhasa airport.  

Our first view of the Lhasa River, Tibet's longest river at 1,000 km. 

Perhaps because the airport authorities know what a novelty it is to visit Tibet, they had a slew of signs tourists could hold while standing in front of a large photo of some random place in Tibet. A cute idea but I would have liked to know what the signs said!

Our guide and driver were waiting for us at the airport when we arrived after 6pm. Even though we only needed a ride into Lhasa an hour away, the tour agency was required to send both a guide and driver to pick us up. Ditto on the return to the airport a few days later where we were unable to take a taxi to the airport. I thought it was odd that the government dictated that we had to pay a full day's fee to the agency for the arrival and departure days even though no guide services were being provided, needed, OR received!

The Lhasa River that flows from western Tibet into India would have a higher water level in June and July. 

Lhasa's elevation of 3,650m or just shy of 12,000ft was of considerable concern to both of us as Steven's had lung issues for decades and I've been on oxygen at night for over a year. Was going to Lhasa the smartest decision we made for our health? Probably not but neither of us was willing to miss this one last opportunity to see Tibet.

It seemed quite strange seeing fake flowers on trees until I remembered someone thought it appropriate to spray the grass green before Queen Elizabeth came to visit my hometown of Ottawa, Canada eons ago. God forbid the Queen saw brown grass or we saw bare trees en route to Lhasa!

Seeing several massive signs on the highway, there was no doubt who controls Tibet today. In my mind, it's impossible to post about Tibet without delving into the contentious relationship between China and Tibet as that gives some insight into tourists' experiences in Tibet. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, before the 1950s Tibet was largely isolated from the rest of the world. The region was a unique cultural and religious community with its own language and Tibetan form of Buddhism. There was little communication from the outside world, and economic development was minimal. International legal scholars agree that from 1911 until the Chinese invaded and 'liberated' Tibet in 1950, it operated as a fully independent state by modern standards.

The invasion began one of the saddest chapters in Tibetan history with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, the destruction of almost every historical structure on the high-altitude plateau, the absorption of two-thirds of Tibet into China, and an assault on the Tibetan way of life.

In October 1950 the Chinese government essentially forced the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and then political leader of Tibet, to sign the 17-point Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet or risk further military action. The controversial document promised a one-country-two systems arrangement but there were few guarantees for what the Chinese considered Tibet's “peaceful liberation.” 

After a failed uprising against party rule in 1959, the Dalai Lama fled China for India where he has been in exile since. The fall of 1966 saw raids on Lhasa's Jokhang Monastery, one of the holiest places in Tibet, with statues smashed and thangkas or Buddhist scrolls burned. In the spirit of dismantling the "Four Olds," old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits, there was large-scale destruction of virtually all religious monuments in Tibet. Images of Buddha were replaced with Chairman Mao and Communist slogans supplanted Buddhist mantras.

Following Mao's death in 1976, there was some relaxation of the harsh rules imposed on the people of Tibet with the Chinese government beginning a program of extended personal and economic freedom but with authoritarian one-party rule. Limited religious freedoms returned in the early 1980s. 

Fast forward to the present day when Tibetans claim the monasteries remain under tight political control and largely exist for the benefit of tourists like us. More encouragingly, however, the Tibetan economy is booming at the fastest rate in China thanks to a staggering $900 billion that has been poured into Tibet's infrastructure by the Chinese government in recent years. Expanded train, road, and air links are revolutionizing life across the 'roof of the world' at an astonishing rate. However, many Tibetans declare that Chinese immigrants have become the real beneficiaries of the economic boom and consider the continued Chinese presence as an occupation by a foreign power. Conversely, the Chinese feel that Tibet has been a rightful part of China for centuries and that they freed Tibet from a repressive regime in which much of the population lived in serfdom.

Many Tibetans also believe that the Tibet Autonomous Region established by China in 1965, is ‘autonomous’ in name only. They contend Tibet is governed by officials chosen by the Chinese government, with policy decisions subject to approval from Beijing, and that there has never been a Tibetan in the most senior role of Party Secretary of the TAR. 

According to an old article from the International Campaign for Tibet, human rights conditions in Tibet remain dismal. Under the Chinese occupation, the Tibetan people have been denied most rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights including the rights to self-determination, freedom of speech, assembly, movement, expression, and travel. 

Public opinion outside China, particularly in the West, sees Tibet as an independent or at least highly autonomous entity. There is no question, though, that Tibet's spiritual leader and representative of Tibetan Buddhism, the 14th Dalai Lama, has become one of the world’s most recognizable and highly regarded individuals. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and the US Congressional Gold Medal in 2006. The government in Beijing views the 89-year-old spiritual leader as a dangerous separatist and has largely refused to engage in talks with the India-based Tibetan government-in-exile.

Next post: Huffing and puffing while exploring Lhasa's Potala Palace and Jokhang Monastery!

Posted on August 19th, 2024 from our home in suburban Denver where temps close to 100 have become the norm. We're so much luckier than those in the US Northeast who have been battered by intense storms that have seen record amounts of rain and devastation as a result. Please take care of yourself and your loved ones wherever you are.