/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE-TIBET: Snow Land is also Show Land

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lobsang Souchong

SHIGATSE, Tibet, Sep 21 2004 (IPS) - With her back to Shigatse’s famed Tashilumpu monastery, the scantily clad woman with ample bosom and derriere outlined in a revealing mini-skirt, is training her video camera at a young Tibetan mother and her daughter of about five or six years, both smiling irrepressibly in typical Socialist Realism fashion.

A small lamb, representing innocence, gambols next to them. The bosomy, larger than life-size woman, her camera bag beside her foot, is part of a group of recently constructed bronze statuary in front of a newly created square facing one of Tibet’s holiest sites here.

Shigatse is the second largest city in Tibet, ruled by China since it took control in 1950. Last year, the neighbourhood directly in front of the Tashilumpu monastery, built in 1447, had been cleared and turned into a large public square, a miniaturized Tianenmen Square.

It is somewhat like what the Chinese did in Lhasa in front of the Potala Palace – the former residence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, which is now faced by nightclubs and discos.

The statues are in the middle of the stone-paved square, bereft of trees and foliage except for the periphery. There are several park benches facing Tashilumpu, and nearby at the open-air snack bar, Hindi movie music blares.

Shigatse, the traditional seat of the Panchen Lamas, the second highest spiritual leaders of Tibet, used to attract many pilgrims. But it is now a big money-spinner – charging tourists a 55-renminbi (about seven U.S. dollars) entrance fee.

However, few pilgrims visit nowadays as the Dalai Lama’s approved reincarnation of the 11th Panchen Lama, now about 15 years old, languishes under house arrest by Chinese authorities in some unknown location.

One foreign non-government worker who preferred to remain anonymous commented: "Tashilumpu is no longer a very spiritual or friendly environment. People seem to have more fun posing in front of the statues which are popular with the Chinese tourists."

On one of the park benches, seated along with real people, there is a second bronze statue of a foreign backpacker, knapsack behind him on the bench, sitting thumbs-up and facing a Tibetan boy of about eight or 10 years old, two fingers upright like a ‘V’ or victory sign, his one foot resting on a football.

Catty-cornered in front of him, there is another foreign backpacker – unmistakably Caucasian with a big nose, baseball cap turned back seated on a bicycle, facing a Tibetan man formally dressed in a traditional ‘chupa’ (robe) with a goat by his foot. It seems somewhat incongruous, as shepherds would dress more rustically.

The real clincher, however, is that the sculptor placed a small mobile phone in the hand of the Tibetan man with the goat – no doubt a sign of his material progress under the present regime.

Nevertheless, the relationship between the visiting tourists and locals is generally an unequal one, and one wonders whether the anonymous sculptor intended to make a wry commentary on this.

Meantime in the park, beggars accost visitors and tourists. A monk wielding a wad of small denomination notes peels one off and gives it to the beggar boy.

It seems that the authorities in Beijing want to encourage the wealthier tourists to visit primitive, "holy" Tibet, although Shigatse is almost now completely ‘sinofied’, except for the Tashilumpu Monastery compound.

En route on the five-day overland journey from Kathmandu to Lhasa, well-trained, smooth-spoken Chinese guides have been hired to replace the Tibetan guides, who were schooled in India and whose politically incorrect loyalties to the Dalai Lama made them suspect.

Like most Chinese, one such guide does not like barren, high-altitude Tibet and said he finds the Tibetans "a primitive people". He also complains about the number of beggars, obviously never having been to the Buddhist sites in India where the masses of beggars outnumber the pilgrims.

These new Chinese guides, replacing the Tibetans, are a sore point and, judging by the guarded comments of some of the Tibetans in the tourist industry, bitterly resented.

"They (the Beijing authorities) keep changing the rules, and never consult with us," one Tibetan tour operator grumbled.

While the bronze statuary groupings of the tourist and local interactions are blissfully idealised as kitsch, the reality is quite different.

At one of the glaciers, rude but savvy nomads place their yaks for the tourists to photograph at five yuan (60 U.S. cents) per click.

Demanding beggars thump on windows. While many tourists innocently dole out sweets and candies to the children, little do they realise that they are training them to become beggars expecting handouts, only to become aggressive if not appeased.

As frequent visitors to Tibet cannot help noticing, each year there are always more changes, made in the name of progress.

Gyantse, for example, was long considered one of the most typically traditional Tibetan towns in an increasingly sinofied Tibetan Autonomous Region.

This year is the centenary of the historic British siege of Tibet, led by Francis Younghusband, whose capture of the garrison town and led to the installation of a British Resident.

Although no Chinese were involved, Beijing is patriotically celebrating the resistance.

For this, old buildings are being torn down to make way for wide Chinese-style boulevards, to be lined no doubt with the ubiquitous, glossy white-tiled structures with blue-glassed windows and topped with curved brown Chinese tiles.

Hence, Gyantse has lost most of its traditional charm. It is now relegated to a small area around the Kumbun stupa and monastery – much like how Lhasa’s traditional structures are limited to the immediate neighbourhood surrounding the Jokhang.

”Tibet has become totally overrun by the Chinese colonisation,” Tibetologist and president of New York’s Tibet House, Robert Thurman, said on a recent trip to Lhasa.

"Lhasa growing with frightening and unrelenting speed into a kind of frontier boom town, a high-altitude Vegas, with the wonderful old monuments museum-like in between, and the pious Tibetans doggedly doing their Kora (ritual circumambulation) in the midst of traffic, office workers, gaudy street stalls, passing by karaokes and bordellos."

In fact, the changes in Gyantse are evident to visitors upon reaching Lhasa, where they are greeted by a number of massive billboards with blissfully smiling locals proclaiming ‘China Tibet Tourism Welcomes You to Holy Tibet’.

Approaching the looming Potala Palace, visitors can observe another sign that had misspelled ”Snowland”, as Tibet is usually referred to, and instead read "Show Land”. Welcome to Show Land indeed.