Destination: Tibet
Gere on the China-Tibet Train
by Michael Yessis | 07.15.06 | 10:11 AM ET
Richard Gere, the actor and chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times about the new train from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet and its consequences. “[It] is a staggering engineering achievement and a testimony to the developing greatness of China,” Gere writes. “But it is also the most serious threat by the Chinese yet to the survival of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity. In the words of a well-known Tibetan religious teacher who died after many years in a Chinese prison, the railway heralds ‘a time of emergency and darkness’ for Tibet.”
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Yahoo! BuzzTrain Completes First Journey to Tibet. But is it Progress or a ‘Second Invasion’?
by Jim Benning | 07.07.06 | 7:30 AM ET
In the final chapter of his terrific 1988 book Riding the Iron Rooster, about riding trains through China, Paul Theroux wrote of the difficulty in traveling from China to Lhasa, Tibet—“six days overland from Xian, or else a long and frightening flight from Chengdu.” Later, he continued, “[T]he main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese—and so thoroughly old-fangled and pleasant—is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached. The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.” If only it were so. Earlier this week, after years of construction, a train completed the first journey from Beijing to Lhasa along what is now the world’s highest railway, topping out at a breathtaking 16,640 feet. “Laptop computers and digital music players failed because the tiny air bags that cushion their moving parts broke,” the AP reported via the Los Angeles Times. “Some passengers threw up. Others took Tibetan herbs or breathed oxygen through tubes.”
Movie Review: ‘Mountain Patrol: Kekexili’
by Ben Keene | 04.14.06 | 2:33 PM ET
The menacing howl of the wind across a barren plateau 13,000 feet above sea level. The sharp cry of vultures circling over the carcasses of hundreds of chiru (Tibetan antelope) slaughtered for their downy fur. The crackle of flames leaping from a rusty Land Rover abandoned by suspected poachers. These are the sounds of Mountain Patrol: Kekexili, the latest dramatic release from National Geographic World Films, which opens in select theaters this weekend. I was invited to an advance screening Wednesday and was both entertained and educated.
Mattel’s New Ken Doll: “He’s Been Backpacking Through Tibet”
by Jim Benning | 02.12.06 | 2:56 AM ET
Pico Iyer Discusses the Dalai Lama on Tibet.net
by Jim Benning | 11.21.05 | 1:43 AM ET
The official website of the Central Tibetan Administration has posted an interview with Pico Iyer, noting that Iyer is now at work on a book about the Dalai Lama. Iyer recalled meeting the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala in 1974, before he had gained celebrity in the West. Iyer marveled that he and his father, who was a philosophy professor, rang the doorbell and “were able to spend an hour and half [in] conversation with His Holiness.”
The Critics: “Sky Burial”
by Jim Benning | 08.22.05 | 11:41 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times reviewed what sounds like an unusual novel about Tibet: “Sky Burial” by Chinese journalist Xinran. The novel, writes Seth Faison, “offers a perspective Western readers rarely get: a Chinese person who sympathizes with Tibetans. It’s a compelling story about a woman from Suzhou who goes to Tibet to search for her lost husband. She encounters danger and hides with a nomadic family in the vast openness of the Tibetan plateau, only to drift for 30 years and become thoroughly immersed in Tibetan culture before she can complete her goal.”
Pico Iyer on “Tibet, Tibet”
by Jim Benning | 10.27.03 | 8:58 PM ET
Iyer reviewed the new book by Patrick French in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “The new work stitches together an unflinching account of the author’s two-and-a-half month journey across Tibet in 1999 with an exhaustive excavation of historical resources designed to show that Tibet was never the peace-loving paradise so many generations of well-wishers have longed for it to be,” Iyer writes. In the end, it seems, Iyer had mixed feelings about the book. “I began to feel that what [French] had seen and heard in Tibet was so abject and so harrowing that he could no longer even open his ears to the hopeful voices of Dharamsala and London.” The article is available online only to subscribers.
Is Television Destroying Bhutan?
by Jim Benning | 07.04.03 | 12:06 AM ET
The Himalayan kingdom is touted by adventure travel companies as a more exotic and remote alternative to Nepal and Tibet. But the country is changing fast, thanks in no small part to TV, introduced just four years ago. So how have Larry King, the Rock and Bart Simpson altered life in the country? Crime and drug use are up. And a third of Bhutan’s girls now want blonde hair and lighter skin, according to one unofficial survey. “There is something depressing about watching a society casting aside its unique character in favour of a Californian beach,” Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy write in a fascinating story in the Guardian (UK). “Cable TV has created, with acute speed, a nation of hungry consumers from a kingdom that once acted collectively and spiritually.”
Would You Ride This Train?
by Jim Benning | 03.06.02 | 2:46 PM ET
Overland travelers moving between China and Tibet must brave harrowing drives through rugged mountains, but that could change. The Chinese government has approved the development of a railway linking the nation with the “Tibetan Autonomous Region.” As Tibetans fear for their culture’s future, Outpost Magazine examines the cultural, political and environmental consequences of “one of the world’s greatest engineering challenges.” Wonders writer Jon Link: “If you take the train - which will be an easier and more spectacular way to arrive than is available now - are you giving tacit approval to its existence?”
Chasing Monks
by Maria Möller | 12.28.01 | 11:51 PM ET
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