Download or read book Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule written by Tubten Khtsun and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1941, Tubten Khétsun is a nephew of the Gyatso Tashi Khendrung, one of the senior government officials taken prisoner after the Tibetan peoples' uprising of March 10, 1959. Khétsun himself was arrested while defending the Dalai Lama's summer palace, and after four years in prisons and labor camps, he spent close to two decades in Lhasa as a requisitioned laborer and "class enemy." In this eloquent autobiography, Khétsun describes what life was like during those troubled years. His account is one of the most dispassionate, detailed, and readable firsthand descriptions yet published of Tibet under the Communist occupation. Khétsun talks of his prison experiences as well as the state of civil society following his release, and he offers keenly observed accounts of well-known events, such as the launch of the Cultural Revolution, as well as lesser-known aspects of everyday life in occupied Lhasa. Since Communist China continues to occupy Tibet, the facts of this era remain obscure, and few of those who lived through it have recorded their experiences at length. Khétsun's story will captivate any reader seeking a refreshingly human account of what occurred during the Maoists' shockingly brutal regime.
Download or read book Tibet in Agony written by Jianglin Li and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1959 the Dalai Lama emerged in India, where he set up his government in exile. Soon after he left Lhasa the Chinese People's Liberation Army pummeled the city in the "Battle of Lhasa." The Tibetans were forced to capitulate, putting Mao in a position to impose Communist rule over Tibet
Download or read book Lhasa written by Robert Barnett and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many Lhasas. One is a grid of uniform boulevards lined with plush hotels, all-night bars, and blue-glass-fronted offices. Another is a warren of alleyways that surround a seventh-century temple built to pin down a supine demoness. A web of Stalinist, rectangular blocks houses the new nomenklatura. Crumbling mansions, once home to noble ministers, famous lovers, nationalist spies, and covert revolutionaries, now serve as shopping malls and faux-antique hotels. Each embodiment of the city partakes of the others' memories, whispered across time and along the city streets. In this imaginative new work, Robert Barnett offers a powerful and lyrical exploration of a city long idealized, disregarded, or misunderstood by outsiders. Looking to its streets and stone, Robert Barnett presents a searching and unforgettable portrait of Lhasa, its history, and its illegibility. His book not only offers itself as a manual for thinking about contemporary Tibet but also questions our ways of thinking about foreign places. Barnett juxtaposes contemporary accounts of Tibet, architectural observations, and descriptions by foreign observers to describe Lhasa and its current status as both an ancient city and a modern Chinese provincial capital. His narrative reveals how historical layering, popular memory, symbolism, and mythology constitute the story of a city. Besides the ancient Buddhist temples and former picnic gardens of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa describes the urban sprawl, the harsh rectangular structures, and the geometric blue-glass tower blocks that speak of the anxieties of successive regimes intent upon improving on the past. In Barnett's excavation of the city's past, the buildings and the city streets, interwoven with his own recollections of unrest and resistance, recount the story of Tibet's complex transition from tradition to modernity and its painful history of foreign encounters and political experiment.
Download or read book Taming Tibet written by Emily Yeh and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet, Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how the transformation of the material landscape of Tibet between the 1950s and the first decade of the twenty-first century has often been enacted through the labor of Tibetans themselves. Focusing on Lhasa, Yeh shows how attempts to foster and improve Tibetan livelihoods through the expansion of markets and the subsidized building of new houses, the control over movement and space, and the education of Tibetan desires for development have worked together at different times and how they are experienced in everyday life.The master narrative of the PRC stresses generosity: the state and Han migrants selflessly provide development to the supposedly backward Tibetans, raising the living standards of the Han's "little brothers." Arguing that development is in this context a form of "indebtedness engineering," Yeh depicts development as a hegemonic project that simultaneously recruits Tibetans to participate in their own marginalization while entrapping them in gratitude to the Chinese state. The resulting transformations of the material landscape advance the project of state territorialization. Exploring the complexity of the Tibetan response to—and negotiations with—development, Taming Tibet focuses on three key aspects of China's modernization: agrarian change, Chinese migration, and urbanization. Yeh presents a wealth of ethnographic data and suggests fresh approaches that illuminate the Tibet Question.
Download or read book An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama written by Diana Lange and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diana Lange's patient investigations have, in this wonderful piece of detective work, solved the mysteries of six extraordinary panoramic maps of routes across Tibet and the Himalayas, clearly hand-drawn in the late 1850s by a local artist, known as the British Library's Wise Collection. Diana Lange now reveals not only the previously unknown identity of the Scottish colonial official who commissioned the maps from a Tibetan Buddhist lama, but also the story of how the Wise Collection came to be in the British Library. The result is both a spectacular illustrated ethnographic atlas and a unique compendium of knowledge concerning the mid-19th century Tibetan world, as well as a remarkable account of an academic journey of discovery. It will entertain and inform anyone with an interest in this fascinating region. This large format book is lavishly illustrated in colour and includes four separate large foldout maps.
Download or read book My Journey to Lhasa written by Alexandra David-Néel and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Islamic Shangri La written by David G. Atwill and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Islamic Shangri-La transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as it traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the 17th century to the present. Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, David Atwill's vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid influences and internal diversity of Tibet. In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, this book presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet's standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia.
Download or read book Forbidden Memory written by Tsering Woeser and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Red Guards arrived in Tibet in 1966, intent on creating a classless society, they unleashed a decade of revolutionary violence, political rallies, and factional warfare marked by the ransacking of temples, the destruction of religious artifacts, the burning of books, and the public humiliation of Tibet's remaining lamas and scholars. Within Tibet, discussion of those events has long been banned, and no visual records of this history were known to have survived. In Forbidden Memory the leading Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser presents three hundred previously unseen photographs taken by her father, then an officer in the People's Liberation Army, that show for the first time the frenzy and violence of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. Found only after his death, Woeser's annotations and reflections on the photographs, edited and introduced by the Tibet historian Robert Barnett, are based on scores of interviews she conducted privately in Tibet with survivors. Her book explores the motives and thinking of those who participated in the extraordinary rituals of public degradation and destruction that took place, carried out by Tibetans as much as Chinese on the former leaders of their culture. Heartbreaking and revelatory, Forbidden Memory offers a personal, literary discussion of the nature of memory, violence, and responsibility, while giving insight into the condition of a people whose violently truncated history they are still unable to discuss today. Access the glossary.
Download or read book Tibet on Fire written by Tsering Woeser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Tibetan monks are setting themselves on fire Since the 2008 uprising, nearly 150 Tibetan monks have set fire to themselves in protest at the Chinese occupation of their country. Most have died from their injuries. Author Tsering Woeser is a prominent voice of the Tibetan movement, and one of the few Tibetan authors to write in Chinese. Her stirring acts of resistance have led to her house arrest, where she remains under close surveillance to this day. Tibet On Fire is her account of the oppression Tibetans face and the ideals driving those who resist, both the self-immolators and other Tibetans like herself. With a cover image designed by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Tibet on Fire is angry and cogent: a clarion call for the world to take action.
Download or read book Lost Lhasa written by and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 1997 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of an Austrian mountain climber's escape from a British internment camp in India during World War Two and his twenty-one-month journey through the Himalayas to safety in the Forbidden City of Lhasa in Tibet.
Download or read book Tibet written by Michael Buckley and published by Bradt Travel Guides. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new, thoroughly updated edition of Bradt's Tibet encompasses the wider region of ethnic Tibet with more detailed coverage of the Amdo and Kham regions than is found in other guides. It also includes essential information on new border openings and is particularly strong on map data, which is extremely difficult to find in Tibet itself, including new theme maps covering a range of topics, from Tibetan regions to the Three Parallel Rivers UN World Heritage Sites, sacred landscapes, permafrost and major river sources. Bradt's Tibet benefits from years of consistent research. Michael Buckley has been visiting and researching Tibet for more than 30 years and has a raft of books to his name. Thanks to his knowledge and expertise, Bradt's Tibet offers a more extensive language appendix than is found in other guidebooks, plus essential guidelines on cultural etiquette (including a special section on hand gestures to use), local customs and travelling with minimum impact on Tibet's culture and environment. There is also an appendix on fauna and an extensive list of recommended further resources, including books, music, films and even virtual reality Exploring ethnic Tibet independently is a challenge. The 'land of snows' possesses the world's highest peaks (including Everest) and its deepest gorges as well as some of the wildest and roughest road routes in high Asia. Bradt's Tibet provides all the practical information you need to explore ethnic Tibet independently, whether motoring, mountain-biking or trekking. Tibet has always fascinated travellers and armchair travellers because it is so difficult to access due to its remoteness and extreme altitude. Now, under Chinese rule, Tibet is a sensitive destination for Westerners. Visitors needs all the information that they can lay their hands on-and this guidebook provides plenty. With flight routes and rail access to Tibet expanding, and new border crossings opening, Michael Buckley and Bradt's Tibet provide all of the information you need to make the most of a trip.
Download or read book The Museum on the Roof of the World written by Clare Harris and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues in The Museum on the Roof of the World that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book is a powerful account of the museums created by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans and the nationalist agendas that have played out in them. Harris begins with the British public’s first encounter with Tibetan culture in 1854. She then examines the role of imperial collectors and photographers in representations of the region and visits competing museums of Tibet in India and Lhasa. Drawing on fieldwork in Tibetan communities, she also documents the activities of contemporary Tibetan artists as they try to displace the utopian visions of their country prevalent in the West, as well as the negative assessments of their heritage common in China. Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.
Download or read book Sky Train written by Canyon Sam and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new "Sky Train," she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders. As she uncovers stories of Tibetan women's courage, resourcefulness, and spiritual strength in the face of loss and hardship since the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, and observes the changes wrought by the controversial new rail line in the futuristic "new Lhasa," Sam comes to embrace her own capacity for letting go, for faith, and for acceptance. Her glimpse of Tibet's past through the lens of the women - a visionary educator, a freedom fighter, a gulag survivor, and a child bride - affords her a unique perspective on the state of Tibetan culture today - in Tibet, in exile, and in the widening Tibetan diaspora. Gracefully connecting the women's poignant histories to larger cultural, political, and spiritual themes, the author comes full circle, finding wisdom and wholeness even as she acknowledges Tibet's irreversible changes.
Download or read book Medicine and Memory in Tibet written by Theresia Hofer and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet�s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang. Due to difficult research access and the power of state institutions in the writing of history, the perspectives of more marginal amchi have been absent from most accounts of Tibetan medicine. Theresia Hofer breaks new ground both theoretically and ethnographically, in ways that would be impossible in today�s more restrictive political climate that severely limits access for researchers. She illuminates how medical practitioners safeguarded their professional heritage through great adversity and personal hardship.
Download or read book China s Great Train written by Abrahm Lustgarten and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lustgarten's book is a timely and provocative account of China's unstoppable quest to build a railway into Tibet, and the nation's obsession to transform its land and its people.
Download or read book The Temples of Lhasa written by Andre Alexander and published by Serindia Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " The Temples of Lhasa is a comprehensive survey of historic Buddhist sites in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The study is based on the Tibetan Heritage Fund's official five-year architectural conservation project in Tibet, during which the author and his team had unlimited access to the buildings studied. The documented sites span the entire known history of Tibetan Buddhist art and architecture from the 7th to the 21st centuries The book is divided into thirteen chapters, covering all the major and minor temples in historic Lhasa. These include some of Tibet's oldest and most revered sites, such as the Lhasa Tsukla-khang and Ramoche, as well as lesser-known but highly important sites such as the Jebumgang Lha-khang, Meru Dratsang and Meru Nyingpa. It is illustrated with numerous color plates taken over a period of roughly 15 years from the mind-1980s to today and is augmented with rare photographs and reproductions of Tibetan paintings. This book also provides detailed architectural drawings and maps made by the project. Each site has been completely surveyed, documented and analyzed. The history of each site has been written - often for the first time - based on source texts and survey results, as well as up-to-date technology such as carbon dating, dendrochronology, and satellite data. Tibetan source texts and oral accounts have also been used to reconstruct the original design of the sites. Matthew Akester has contributed translations of Tibetan source texts, including excerpts from the writings of the Fifth and Thirteenth Dalai Lamas. This documentation of Tibetan Buddhist temple buildings is the most detailed of its kind, and is the first professional study of some of Tibet's most significant religious buildings. The comparative analysis of Tibetan Buddhist architecture covers 13 centuries of architectural history in Tibet."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book The Rough Guide to China written by David Leffman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 1048 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rough Guide to China covers of all of mainland China including Tibet, along with the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Clear, detailed maps show all listed arrival points, accommodation, restaurants and sights, while boxes provide bilingual keys. Use it to explore the sophisticated nightlife emerging in Beijing and Shanghai, to chill out in the mellow travellers’ havens of Dali and Yangshuo, or roam the streets of characterful antique towns such as Lijiang. Up to date descriptions give the low-down on famous sights such as Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army outside Xi’an, limestone peaks around Guilin and the cruise through the mighty Three Gorges along the Yangzi. There’s also full practical information for less-known attractions: hiking holy mountains such as Shandong’s Tai Shan; where to experience the culture of China’s many ethnic groups, including Tibetans, Miao, Dai and Mongolians; how to explore remoter rural areas; and where to experience local food, from streetside snack stalls to plush Beijing Duck restaurants.
