Next time you're in Lhasa, don't forget to visit the Museum of Modern Art. Climb the often steep and narrow stairs of the White and Red Palaces of the Potala, burn a yak butter candle in front of one of the thousands of painted Buddhas of the Jokhang. They are to Lhasa what Versailles and Notre-Dame are to Paris. But don't overlook the brand-new art museum, opening in December 2023 in the former Lhasa cement factory, masterfully transformed and restored by designers and architects from Shanghai's Tongji University. Here you'll discover a radically new facet of the autonomous province of Tibet, or rather Xizang, as it's officially called.
I dare to make this recommendation because I know you won't be disappointed by either the container or the content, so rich and surprisingly innovative are they visually. The mix of industrial history and cultural modernity is very successful. In doing so, I know I'm taking the risk of being scorned as a “useful idiot of the Beijing regime”, so enduring is the cliché of Tibetans being “invaded and oppressed” by the Chinese. It's an accepted risk, insofar as I'm simply recounting what I've seen, and which will sooner or later impose itself on our consciences.
Over a two-week period, I travelled between the provinces of Qinghai and its capital, Xining, and Xizang, from the Lhasa valley to the Nyingchi prefecture, in the company of an executive from a Catalan cultural foundation, a Canadian photographer and designer, a doctor from Xian and local communication officers.
The two provinces are very similar. Mountainous, semi-desert, with a harsh climate and a population of around ten million for a territory four times the size of France, they form the heartland of the Tibetan highlands and Buddhism.
Contrary to the stereotype that they are the domain of the Dalai Lama alone, they are home to Buddhist sects of various persuasions and numerous religious and ethnic minorities, including Muslims, Christians, Taoists, Han, Hui, Tu, Salar and Mongols. Rising between 2,600 and 8,000 meters above sea level, the region is Asia's water tower and the source of the great rivers that irrigate the Chinese plains, notably the Yellow and Yangtze rivers.
To put it simply, Tibetan Buddhism derives from Tantrism and is divided into four main schools: Gelug, the most recent school, known as the Yellow Hat School, to which both the 14th Dalai Lama, who has been a refugee in India since 1959, and the 11th Panchen Lama, who lives between Beijing and Shigatse, refer; Nyingma, the oldest, known as the Red Hat sect, closer to the primitive Tibetan religion and grouped around six large monasteries; Kagyu, the White sect because of the white stripes adorning the monks' robes, and the smallest, the Sakya school, known as variegated (Grey-White). Each has its own traditions, doctrine and practices, which are more or less rigorous, and do not always mix well. The various obediences number some 46,000 monks.
So much for the general context.
In Xining, our program included a visit to the Ta'er monastic complex, one of the oldest and largest in the country, with dozens of buildings and almost ten thousand monks; the Qinghai Salt Lake Biological Reserve, one of the largest and highest in continental Asia (3,000 metres above sea level); the village of Deji, home to some 250 families from the most isolated regions of the province, the town of Tongren, a historic commercial and cultural center, the famous Regong Art School in Longshu (traditional thangka painting, frescoes and patchwork), and the Golog Ethnic High School, a free boarding school with 800 students from the region's various ethnic minorities.
But perhaps the most spectacular visit was to the Hainan Prefecture Energy Complex. Twenty billion dollars have been invested to build, as far as the eye can see, the world's largest solar farm (600 km2 of photovoltaic panels, more than twice the size of the canton of Geneva), coupled with concentrated solar power towers and vast wind farms over an area larger than the canton of Vaud (4,000 km2), all coupled with hydroelectric dams on the Yellow River. With 1,200 gigawatts of solar and wind power installed to date (see Le Temps, December 14), China has become by far the world's leading producer of these forms of renewable energy.
In Xizang (Tibet Autonomous Province), the program was just as concentrated: Potala Palace, with its walls bleached with yak milk, Jokhang Temple, a major pilgrimage site, Jieguan Museum of Modern Art and Gallery of Contemporary Art with works worth several million dollars, Tibetan Medicine Center, University, Academy of Tibetan Buddhism (a vast theology campus comprising 700 monks and a hundred nuns from the various schools), and even a factory making high-tech titanium-based non-stick pots and pans!
The end of the tour was devoted to the natural beauty of Nyingchi prefecture (“The Throne of the Sun” for Tibetans and “The Switzerland of Tibet” for tourists), reached by a brand-new freeway that rises to an altitude of 5,000 metres. This city of 500,000 inhabitants lies at the heart of wooded valleys bordered by lakes and high peaks, such as the spectacular Namcha Barwa massif, which rises to 7,782 metres and is considered Tibet's holiest mountain along with Mount Kailash.
What can we learn from this trip? First of all, a surprising impression of modernity and economic development. As sleepy, dusty and slightly depressing as the city and surrounding area of Lhasa seemed to me on my first visit in 2003, it now seems so active, lively and energetic. Freeways, high-speed railroads (Beijing-Xian-Lhasa line and Chengdu-Nyingchi line), impeccable airports, as well as apartment blocks, heritage buildings and old towns that have been completely restored, asphalt roads and electric vehicles, high-voltage power lines, tourist infrastructure, schools, colleges, hospitals, small and large businesses.
Since the 2012 decision to develop the eastern provinces, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in infrastructure development. It shows. Tibet is becoming a popular destination for Chinese and Asian tourists.
Growth has exceeded 10% per year for several years now. To achieve this result, Beijing has mobilized the country on a grand scale, with a rather original measure: mobilizing the financial, entrepreneurial and social resources of the wealthy coastal provinces. Energy production is being developed by consortia in central and western China, while the wealthy provinces of Shanghai and Guangzhou are building roads, schools, hospitals and factories, providing not only material resources but also human and technical resources, sending executives, teachers, managers and civil servants to train the local workforce.
A form of mentoring which has the advantage of making both parties responsible for the country's development. Western propaganda has seen this as a form of guardianship of Tibetans. The results have been spectacular: in less than ten years, extreme poverty and illiteracy have been eradicated. Let's not forget that until the 1950s, 90% of the Tibetan population lived in serfdom and could neither read nor write.
Another observation: Tibetan culture and Buddhism did not seem to me to be under threat - quite the contrary. Twenty years ago, you could still see on the walls of certain temples the depredations committed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, while greedy monks held between their fingers bundles of banknotes entrusted to them by pilgrims who entered the temple on their stomachs in the mud. Today, this is no longer the case. Offerings are deposited in discreet trunks. The halls, filled with paintings and statues of Buddhas, Boddhisattvas and other maitreyas, have been restored and illuminated. Red-robed monks abound in the streets, temples and monastic schools. Many monasteries have been renovated and equipped with heating, access roads and Internet connections.
The Potala and Tibetan culture are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, as is Tibetan medicine. The Tibetan language is taught in schools and appears on public monuments and official documents alongside ordinary Chinese. Numerous museums and libraries conserve, collect, transcribe, comment on and digitize the sacred texts of Tibetan Buddhism, making them available to monks and the general public via the Internet in an unprecedented effort to archive and preserve documents sometimes forgotten in monastery archives. Over 200 researchers are working on this project, both at Xizang University and at the Tibetology Research Center in Beijing.
On the government website, you can even find an official document extolling the virtues of freedom of worship and religion in Tibet. It's true that temples are more likely to feature the portrait of the Panchen Lama than that of the Dalai Lama, hated since his flight to Dharamshala and strongly suspected of having supported resistance movements and the 2008 riots in Lhasa. It's probably a paradox for a European, but in Lhasa and Xining, Tibetan tradition and religion seemed far more alive than Christian tradition and worship in Europe.
The campaign to modernize and integrate historic Tibet into modern China was carried out under the slogan: “Tibet is our home, China is our homeland”. It's safe to say that the gamble is about to pay off. With the agreement on joint border control reached with India just before the BRICS summit in Kazan last October, the West's last hope of separating Tibet from China has vanished.
By Guy Mettan
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