As the plane began its descent into Lhasa Gonggar International Airport, one of the highest airports in the world at 3,600 metres, I see from the window that we are flying below the mountain peaks – barren looking mountains topped by snow, with fertile river valleys below.   Finally, I was flying into Lhasa, Tibet, where I would begin a 1,500 km drive west across the country to Mt Kailash. There, we planned to spend four days hiking around the mountain on a traditional pilgrimage route. Mt Kailash is a mountain revered as most sacred by Tibetan Buddhists, Hindus, and followers of Tibetan Bon religion alike.

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I had planned to live and work in Tibet almost 40 years ago in the 1980s, but the job – teaching on an  English language program for tour guides – had fallen through at the last minute.  Then, in 2019, a friend who had made the journey before, encouraged me to join a tour with a difference (i.e. visiting Tibetan Buddhist sites before hiking over 50 km.s around Mt Kailash) but then the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to that.  Finally, in 2024, the tour was back on so I eagerly signed up.

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Foreigners can only visit Tibet if they are part of a tour group, with a tour guide and a driver (though as I discovered later, the tour group can be comprised of only 2 people, provided the requirement of a guide and driver are met and all the necessary paperwork is taken care of). There were 10 in our group – a mix of nationalities, including two young Ukrainian women, who were there to make a movie, two Swiss women, one half Tibetan and the other an older adventure seeker, a German dental technician, four Americans (two of Indian heritage), and myself – though most of us hadn’t really gotten to know each other at this point.  More on that later in this story.

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The plane made a smooth landing and we disembarked into a futuristic looking terminal in the shape of a lotus.  I already began to feel light headed from the altitude as we walked across the carpark to our small bus, which was waiting to take us for the one hour ride into Lhasa itself, which involved a journey along a motorway and through a tunnel. Finally we arrived in Lhasa and the Tibetan part of town, and the hotel where we would be staying.

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Insomnia and headaches take their toll, but I still manage to go out the next day to look around.  The streets were clean, the electric motorbikes dangerous (due to making little sound and weaving in and out among the pedestrians), and the Chinese security presence, especially around the Potala Palace and the Jokhang Monastery, overbearing. There are frequent document checks and scans of bags, ubiquitous CCTV cameras every 30 or 40 metres, and the security vehicles parked strategically near places where there had been self-immolations in the past.

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We went as a group to Jokhang Monastery.  Considered as the ‘spiritual heart of Lhasa’, Jokhang consists of a temple and a monastery located next to Barkhor Square.  Built during the 7th Century, the Temple and Monastery complex have a chequered background, having been taken over by non-believers at least twice since it was built – the first time during an anti-Buddhist period in the 9th and 10th centuries, when it was purportedly used as a stable, and again in the 1960s when Chairman Mao’s Red Guards forbade using it for worship for a decade, with parts of the Temple being used to house pigs, as a slaughterhouse, a hotel and a Chinese Army Barracks.  It was then rebuilt, only to suffer damage from a fire in 2018, but has since been restored to at least some of its former glory.

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Anyway, we queued to get in at the tourists entrance, which was less crowded than the one for pilgrims (which was crammed with hundreds of people waiting to enter).  People were doing full prostrations in front of the temple. Then once we got in, the queues merged and after walking around the main part of the temple amidst the crush of the crowds, it all became too claustrophobic for me so I left. I went up to the roof, but it was full of Chinese tourists taking selfies in quasi-religious poses, so I found the exit and went out.

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Two of our group later witnessed a mother with two small children, obviously very poor, doing prostrations in front of the Jokhang Temple and because she was so poor looking, people started giving her money.  The Chinese guards rushed over to drag her away, her two children clinging to her legs, because they said she was ‘begging’ which was against the law.  After she was removed, a squad of Chinese soldiers marched over the spot where she had been doing prostrations and stood guard there, presumably to discourage any others who might be tempted to do likewise.  The arrogance of the Chinese police and military was to be seen everywhere we went.

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The next day we were given tickets to visit the Potala Palace, built in 1645 and now a museum, but which had, prior to the Chinese invasion of 1957, been the home of the Dalai Lama and an administrative centre of Tibet.  After passing the obligatory document police check and scan, we entered first the white tower, which was established for the purpose of housing the Administration who oversaw a feudal system of semi-autonomous fiefdoms.  The second red tower housed the various senior monks, including the Dalai Lama.  The accommodation for the previous Dalai Lamas had been preserved, except the quarters of the current Dalai Lama who is clearly persona non grata as far as the Chinese authorities are concerned.

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Now, I don’t want to portray life as black and white before ‘liberation’ – a feudal slave society controlled by the monkhood, as the Chinese authorities would have us believe.  It clearly wasn’t.  But it is difficult to ascertain the truth of Tibet’s past. On one extreme, there is the pro-Chinese interpretation of ‘liberating’ peasants from the ‘yoke of feudal serfdom’ and removing their repressive masters, and that Tibet historically was part of China anyway.  On the other hand, there is the ‘free Tibet’ perspective, which in its more extreme view, tends to  portray pre-Chinese occupied Tibet as a peaceful Buddhist paradise, a ‘mandala of the peaceful, perfected universe’ in the words of Robert Thurman, a well known Tibetan Buddhist scholar  and translator.

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As often is the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in between, though one can’t help but wonder why the Chinese Government (PRC) exercises such a high level of control if the Tibetan people are truly happy with their lot, as the Chinese authorities claim.  One also wonders why the PRC does not allow any open discussion of the extent to which Tibetan society was feudal or oppressive.

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