I first became interested in Tibetans and their relationship with China when, as a nineteen-year-old backpacker, I found myself traveling through the Sino-Tibetan frontier. While drinking yak butter tea in a monk’s cell or eating mutton in nomad tents, it was easy to forget that I was in the People’s Republic of China. So I began to wonder, how did this happen? As a historian of modern China and Inner Asia, I continue to look for answers. My work is driven by an otherwise unremarkable observation: the violent, prolonged, and perhaps incomplete process by which the diverse Qing empire was remade into a Chinese nation-state is among the key unresolved questions of modern Chinese history.
I’ve read a bunch of English-language memoirs written by Tibetans living in exile. My Tibetan Childhood is different. Originally written in Tibetan and published by an underground press in China, Naktsang Nulo’s remarkable memoir of growing up in the grasslands of Amdo during the 1950s is meant to preserve for younger generations of Tibetans the traumatic story of their homeland’s incorporation into the Chinese state.
The first half offers a nostalgic but unflinching portrayal of life before the coming of the Chinese. Unlike much of the exile literature, this is not an idealized Tibet but one filled with violence and injustice as well as community and faith. The second half describes in harrowing detail the events of 1958 when Nakstang’s chiefdom was destroyed, his father shot and killed, and he and his brother were left to survive prison camps and then horrific famine. All told through the eyes of a child.
In My Tibetan Chldhood, Naktsang Nulo recalls his life in Tibet's Amdo region during the 1950s. From the perspective of himself at age ten, he describes his upbringing as a nomad on Tibet's eastern plateau. He depicts pilgrimages to monasteries, including a 1500-mile horseback expedition his family made to and from Lhasa. A year or so later, they attempted that same journey as they fled from advancing Chinese troops. Naktsang's father joined and was killed in the little-known 1958 Amdo rebellion against the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the armed branch of the Chinese Communist Party. During the next year, the…
Tsering Döndrup, known for his cuttingly satirical, frequently unflattering, and often hilarious critiques of Tibetan and Chinese society, is one of the most celebrated writers of fiction in contemporary Tibet. And this is certainly his most audacious and courageous novel.
Based on extensive interviews and archival sources, The Red Wind Howls essentially begins where Naktsang’s memoir ends: the 1958 Amdo Rebellion and its brutal pacification by the Chinese state. Although moving seamlessly between the protagonist’s childhood, the Cultural Revolution, and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform era, much of the story takes place in the labor camps where tens of thousands of Amdo Tibetans were sent in the aftermath of the 1958 rebellion.
Yet Dhöndrup tells this story with his characteristic iconoclasm and dark humor that frequently had me laughing in spite of the seriousness of the subject matter.
A remarkable novel by one of Tibet's foremost authors, The Red Wind Howls is a courageous and gripping portrayal of Tibetan suffering under Mao's regime. The story delves deep into forbidden history, spanning the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and, most taboo of all, the 1958 Amdo rebellion when Tibetans rose in armed revolt against the Chinese state. Tsering Doendrup self-published the book in 2006, because no publisher would risk accepting it. When the authorities caught wind, all copies were confiscated and the author faced severe reprisals. He lost his job as head of the local…
Get this book first for the extraordinary collection of 300 black-and-white photographs of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa, which is also one of the largest troves of Cultural Revolution-era photographs from anywhere in China. The remarkable photos, which depict the destruction of temples, the humiliation of lamas and members of the old nobility, and more, were taken by Tsering Dorje, a Tibetan officer in the People’s Liberation Army.
Then read the accompanying essays and interviews by Tsering Dorje’s daughter, the prominent Tibetan poet, writer, and public intellectual Tsering Woeser, which not only chronicle the events of the Cultural Revolution but meditate on Tibetan participation in the assaults on Tibet’s cultural heritage and, like the two books above, serve as powerful reminders of the ways communal memory continues to hamper state efforts to fully integrate Tibetans and other non-Han communities into the Chinese nation.
Access the glossary of Tibetan terms. Access the glossary of Chinese and English terms. Access the Index. 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…
This is Robert Barnett’s beautifully written, highly imaginative rumination on the city that for centuries has served as the spiritual, political, and historical center of the Tibetan-Buddhist world. Lhasa, however, has also been an object—sometimes obsession—of generations of outsiders seeking adventure, trade, or enlightenment.
In recent years, Lhasa has been transformed into a Chinese provincial capital, replete with wide avenues, hair salons of questionable reputation, and the white-tiled, blue-tinted-windowed buildings that have become ubiquitous across China’s ‘second and third-tier’ cities.
Barnett, a journalist-turned-scholar of modern Tibet, both juxtaposes and layers all of these Lhasas—along with his own memories of a city he first visited in 1987 and which is now under threat from the relentless pressures of state-capitalist development and Han Chinese settlement.
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…
In this book, Emily Yeh has managed to do one of the hardest things in academic writing. She has produced an erudite, creative, and deeply researched study of contemporary Tibet that is also eminently readable, even for a general audience.
Yeh demonstrates ways that “development” in Tibet, pitched by the state as avenues to better the material lives of Tibetans—for example, through infrastructure projects and the expansion of markets and education—often serves to increase state control while further disempowering Tibetans.
This helps explain why in 2008—in spite of rising economic indicators—demonstrations broke out across the Tibetan plateau and why, in years since, more than 160 Tibetans have self-immolated in protest against the Chinese state.
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…
In my book, I argue that the Communist Party’s goal in the 1950s was not just to build a state but to forge a nation. Focusing on the Amdo region of northeast Tibet, I show how policies meant to gradually convince Tibetans that they were members of a wider political community lost out both to Han-centric assimilationist impulses and to socialist revolutionary impatience.
Efforts by the CCP to forcefully collectivize Amdo’s pastoral areas in 1958 led to a large-scale rebellion, which was ruthlessly put down by the Chinese state. Tens of thousands were arrested. Many thousands were killed. Rather than a voluntary union, Tibet was integrated into China through overwhelming state violence.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
