In this "chilling picture of the brutality of Chinese repression in Tibet" ("Wall Street Journal"), Hilton relates the 1995 kidnap and disappearance of a seven-year-old Tibetan boy believed to the the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama. 21 photos.
On a peaceful summer day in 1952, ten monks on horseback arrived at a traditional nomad tent in northeastern Tibet where they offered the parents of a precocious toddler their white handloomed scarves and congratulations for having given birth to a holy child—and future spiritual leader. Surviving the Dragon is the remarkable life story of Arjia Rinpoche, who was ordained as a reincarnate lama at the age of two and fled Tibet 46 years later. In his gripping memoir, Rinpoche relates the story of having been abandoned in his monastery as a young boy after witnessing the torture and arrest of his monastery family. In the years to come, Rinpoche survived under harsh Chinese rule, as he was forced into hard labor and endured continual public humiliation as part of Mao's Communist "reeducation." By turns moving, suspenseful, historical, and spiritual, Rinpoche's unique experiences provide a rare window into a tumultuous period of Chinese history and offer readers an uncommon glimpse inside a Buddhist monastery in Tibet.
What has made remote, mountainous Tibet and its only real celebrity, the Dalai Lama, so abidingly fascinating to the West? In Virtual Tibet, Orville Schell, one of the preeminent experts on modern China and Tibet, undertakes a strange and wondrous odyssey into our Tibetan fantasies. He recounts the spellbinding adventures of the Western explorers and spiritualists who for centuries were bent on reaching forbidden Tibet and the holy city of Lhasa. Simultaneously, Schell embarks on a parallel present-day journey from Beastie Boys' "Free Tibet" concerts to a re-creation of Lhasa in the high Argentine Andes -- the extravagant set of Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt. At once comic and insightful, Virtual Tibet takes us beyond the fantasies to the reality of an isolated country that has repeatedly won the West's adoration, and paid the price for believing that our allegiance is profound.
A journalist draws on his years in Tibet to offer a detailed view of the region under control of imperialist China, in a book that also sheds light on the exiled Dalai Lama.
_______________ 'Splendid and fascinating ... Teltscher has made remarkable use of her source material, aided by the constantly perceptive and witty tone of Bogle's own writings' - Patrick French, Sunday Times 'It is hard to imagine this fascinating story being told with greater sensitivity or skill' - Sunday Telegraph 'Teltscher is a remarkable new historian ... wholly original' - William Dalrymple 'Thrilling and fascinating ... Letters, journals and documents are woven into the flowing narrative, which is wonderfully vivid and evocative' - Jenny Uglow _______________ An unlikely meeting between a young Scotsman and the Panchen Lama gives birth to a remarkable friendship In 1774 British traders longed to open relations with China so they sent a young Scotsman, George Bogle, as an envoy to Tibet. Bogle became smitten by what he saw there, and struck up a remarkable friendship with the Panchen Lama. This gripping book tells the story of their two extraordinary journeys across some of the harshest and highest terrain in the world: Bogle's mission, and the Panchen Lama's state visit to China, on which British hopes were hung. Piecing together extracts from Bogle's private papers, Tibetan biographies of the Panchen Lama, the account of a wandering Hindu monk and the writings of the Emperor himself, Kate Teltscher deftly reconstructs the momentous meeting of these very different worlds.
In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia—the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792? What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions? What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists? Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire’s colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology—a lottery for assigning administrative posts—was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations. Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire’s frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.
V. 2. It is not possible to understand contemporary politics between China and the Dalai Lama without understanding what happened during the 1950s. This book presents an understanding of that period. It furnishes portraits of these major players and unravels the fateful intertwining of Tibetan and Chinese politics against the backdrop of the Korean War.
To coincide with the celebrations surrounding the 70th birthday of the Dalai Lama and the exhibition to be held at the Ethnographic Museum of Zurich University (Volkerkundemuseum der Universitat Zurich) in July, Serindia will be publishing a history of all the dalai lamas, each portrayed in text and illustrations. Essays contributed by sixteen authors illuminate the institutions of reincarnation and enthronement of the dalai lamas, interregna, panchen lamas, and relations between the dalai lamas and the Chinese. The lives and work of the dalai lamas are illustrated with numerous and largely unpublished sources, including thangkhas, statues of individual dalai lamas, paintings of the Potala, gifts of various dalai lamas to high dignitaries, such as Chinese emperors and Russian tsars, and photographs of the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas from Tibetan, British, and Indian archives."
“With this memoir by a ‘simple monk’ who spent 33 years in prisons and labor camps for resisting the Chinese, a rare Tibetan voice is heard.” —The New York Times Book Review Palden Gyatso was born in a Tibetan village in 1933 and became an ordained Buddhist monk at eighteen—just as Tibet was in the midst of political upheaval. When Communist China invaded Tibet in 1950, it embarked on a program of “reform” that would eventually affect all of Tibet’s citizens and nearly decimate its ancient culture. In 1967, the Chinese destroyed monasteries across Tibet and forced thousands of monks into labor camps and prisons. Gyatso spent the next twenty-five years of his life enduring interrogation and torture simply for the strength of his beliefs. Palden Gyatso’s story bears witness to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the strength of Tibet’s proud civilization, faced with cultural genocide. “To readers of this memoir, however untraveled, Tibet will never again seem remote or unfamiliar. . . . Gyatso reminds us that the language of suffering is universal.” —Library Journal “Has the ring of undeniable truth. . . . Palden Gyatso’s clear-sighted eloquence (in Tsering Shakya’s fluent translation) makes his tale even more engrossing.” —San Francisco Chronicle
The mountains of the kingdom of Bhutan form a part of the Himalayan range. In the year 1772, without provocation, the army of Bhutan invaded the province of Cooch Behar, which shares its borders with Bengal. Alarmed by this incursion, the council of Bengal sent a deputation to deal with the occupying force. The troops of Bhutan were no match for the trained and well-equipped army of Bengal. The King of Bhutan, alarmed and defeated, sent an embassy to the Tesoo Lama to sue for peace by mediation. The Tesoo Lama was, at that time, the regent of Tibet and the guardian of the Dalai Lama, who was still a minor. The Tesoo Lama, acting on the prayers of Bhutan which was a dependency of Tibet sent a deputation to Calcutta, with a telegram addressed to the Governor Warren Hastings in 1774. The governor readily took this opportunity to extend British influence over this little-known quarter of the world. George Boyle was the man chosen to represent the British to carry an answer, and presents, back to the Lama. A man of keen observation and intellect, George Boyle s narrative of this mission is the subject of this book.