Tibet is often narrowly defined as the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but as the BBC points out, half of all Tibetans live outside it. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that recent protests over China’s rule of Tibet have spilled over those borders, too, into the ethnic Tibetan Chinese provinces of Gansu and Sichuan, among other places. 

As it turns out, China has not only ceased processing applications to visit the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but it’s blocking visitors from entering some other ethnic Tibetan regions within China, too. 

Among other incidents, Reuters reports:

Foreigners travelling in western Sichuan province were taken off a public bus at a police check-point at Yajiang, a village on a major highway leading to Lhasa, and sent on a mini-bus to Kangding, a city further east.”

I’ve never visited the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but during a six-week trip to China, I spent a bit of time in Sichuan province. Among the highlights: a harrowing 10-hour-plus bus trip from Chengdu along the Minshan mountain range. It led me into the heavily ethnic Tibetan region around Jiuzhai Gou, a UNESCO World Heritage site I once described as China’s answer to Yosemite. Jiuzhai Gou Valley and the road leading there are dotted with ethnic Tibetan villages, and while I was still quite a distance from the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Lhasa, I often felt as though I were in Tibet.

A popular stop on the road to Jiuzhai Gou is the ethnic Tibetan village of Songpan, where yaks amble down the middle of the street and locals offer horse-trekking trips to visitors.

Yet even there, reports today’s Sydney Morning Herald, “more than a dozen paramilitary trucks, several police four-wheel-drives and two ambulances swept north through the normally tranquil town centre yesterday morning. The previous night, a squad of about 20 armed police marched up and down the main street. The road from the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, which also has a heavier-than-usual police presence, north to Songpan was heavily policed with several roadblocks.”

Reports on the number of dead vary. Some have put the total number in the hundreds. Tibetan activists have reported nine people were killed in a protest in Sichuan. Nineteen were said to have been killed in Gansu.

CNN, meanwhile, has posted video of protestors in Lhasa taken by an Australian tourist.

Photo of Sichuan’s Songpan region by kenner116 via Flickr, (Creative Commons).