Lhasa today is a Chinese city with a minority Tibetan population. The city has grown enormously over recent years with large scale new construction of office and apartment buildings and a huge influx of Chinese.
When we arrived from the airport, it wasn’t until we entered the “old city” that we felt we were in a Tibetan culture. The majority of Lhasa residents do not have a Tibetan background; instead they are recent arrivals from other parts of China.
Signs on businesses are in Chinese; some include Tibetan script (in smaller writing) as well.
Chinese is the language of instruction in the schools; it’s essential for students to be fluent in Chinese in order to take advantage of opportunities for further schooling or work.
The Chinese government provides incentives for people to move to Tibet and set up businesses here. There seem to be clear advantages here to having a non-Tibetan ID card in terms of freedom to travel or establish and run a business.
We have had the good fortune of spending time with a Tibetan guide with whom we have been able to have candid conversations which have created a richer experience for us.
The Tibetans are a very devout people; they continue to observe their religious practices of visiting shrines, making offerings of Juniper incense and money, spinning prayer wheels and circumambulating sacred sites, known as koras. Many practice prostrations before Buddhist statues or in the course of circulating around temples (always in a clockwise direction).
In fact, we saw several devotees who have been doing prostrations to the ground for so long that they have developed large calluses on their foreheads and noses. It’s common for these practitioners to use padded blocks on their hands and feet to reduce skin abrasion.
In years past, the tradition was to send at least one child from each family to a monastery or nunnery. There were literally thousands of monasteries in Tibet and many had hundreds to thousands of monks. Now many of these are gone and the few remaining monasteries have only a few monks.
The Potala Palace, built in the mid-seventh century has been the home of Dalai Lamas from the Fifth in 1645 to the Fourteenth in 1959. At its peak, there were over 6,000 monks in residence. Today there are no monks at all and it has been converted into a museum and living quarters for Chinese military personnel.
The Palace has over 1,000 rooms. We saw the burial tombs of several past Dalai Lamas, shrine rooms for various deities and rooms where Lamas met with ministers and foreign dignitaries. The room where Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama practiced his lessons was most interesting. He loved mechanical devices and was fascinated by clocks. We saw one of the clocks he tinkered with (it looked complete; I’m not sure whether it still functions.
We also visited the Summer Palace, Norbulingka. The day we visited was a festival day when families gather under the shade trees and have picnics. Tibetan opera is performed and musicians and storytellers ply their trade. People also pay homage to buddhas, bodhisatvas and lamas. In a museum we saw the tricycle that Tenzin Gyatso used as a child.
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