Three crimson-robed monks chant quietly as they file through the ancient palace, pausing every now and then to pray in the candlelit rooms filled with Buddhist statues and religious murals.
At the Potala Palace, the mountaintop Tibetan landmark where the Dalai Lama lived until he fled to India in 1959 to escape Chinese control, they are in the minority.
A year-old railway line linking Lhasa, the capital of the remote Himalayan region of Tibet, with the rest of China has brought a deluge of Chinese tourists. Once quiet, holy sites are now filled with sightseers, many of them trailing behind guides loudly explaining their cultural significance.
“In the past, this was a very comfortable place to come for Buddhists. You could see a lot of lamas and Tibetans in this place and it made you feel as if this was a place for your faith,” Renzin Gyaltso, a visiting monk, said as he strolled down a stone path at the palace.
Tibet’s Buddhist culture, often besieged in the past half-century of Chinese rule by religious restrictions and communist political movements, is facing a new threat: mass tourism.
Pilgrimages to sacred sites are an integral part of Tibetan Buddhism. Gyaltso, 29, has visited the sprawling palace 14 times since joining a monastery as a small boy.
“Now I feel sad when I come here because I cannot see any good people, I can’t see any people wearing lama robes. You can’t see anything special, they all look the same,” he said of the tourists, dressed in fleece jackets and sneakers.
The Dalai Lama, while travelling the world and meeting heads of state, has warned that Tibet’s religion and culture are in danger.
“Every year, the Chinese population inside Tibet is increasing at an alarming rate. And, if we are to judge by the example of the population of Lhasa, there is a real danger that the Tibetans will be reduced to an insignificant minority in their own homeland,” he said when accepting the United States congress’s highest civilian honour in October.
Few government plans have succeeded in bringing Chinese to Tibet like the “Sky Train“, which has become a popular alternative to expensive flights or long, bone-crunching bus rides.
Beijing wanted to build a railway to Tibet for decades but was put off by the engineering challenges. But the project was launched in earnest in 2001 and the train began running in July last year, on a specially designed track to protect the delicate permafrost that lies under much of the last third of the rail line.
‘Most important to Tibetan heritage’
According to government statistics, 3,2 million tourists visited Tibet in the first nine months of this year, an increase of 67 percent over the same period last year.
“There’s been a dramatic increase in tourism generally since the opening of the railway,” said Kate Saunders of the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet. “It’s been particularly acute at the major sacred sites… the sites that are most important to Tibetan heritage.”
Besides the 7th-century Potala Palace, tourists in Lhasa pack the Jokhang Temple Monastery, the most sacred of Tibet’s temples, and Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s former summer palace.
Colourfully dressed pilgrims prostrate themselves over and over in the square outside the Jokhang Temple, which is crowded with a gumbo of Tibetan herders, Buddhist monks and wide-eyed tourists. Vendors at cluttered stalls hawk handmade jewellery, prayer flags and Buddha statues carved out of orange-tinged yak bone.
Inside the temple, mostly Chinese tourists crowd a large hall filled with rare religious statues, including a life-sized representation of Buddha Sakyamuni as a 12-year-old. At least three different tour guides are shepherding their groups through the room, lit by bare bulbs, as temple workers keep watch.
“As a Tibetan monk, I feel especially happy to see that so many people are so interested in Tibetan culture, the splendid culture,” said Ngawang Choedra, the director of the temple’s management committee, “but it is a contradiction on one hand to protect the cultural relics and on the other hand to let [tourists] visit Jokhang Temple.”
‘To better protect the structure’
The number of visitors had doubled, or even tripled, in the year since the railway opened, he said. The temple was getting about 2 500 visitors a day, in addition to the 5 000 or 6 000 pilgrims who came to pray.
To handle the crush, the temple administration has drafted a plan to cap the number of tourists a day. The admission fee, which used to be as little as 20 cents (R0,21), has climbed to 70 yuan, more than R63.
At the Potala Palace, the number of visitors was limited to 2 300 a day, Champa Kesang, the director of the management committee, said. “The limitation is to better protect the structure, the architecture of the Potala Palace. The palace was built … of wood and earth,” he said.
Most of the tickets - 1 600 - are allocated to tour groups. Others who want to see the palace must arrive early to get one of the remaining 700, and the line begins to form more than nine hours before the ticket office opens.
The rush of tourists, most of them Chinese, is a sensitive issue. Since communist troops took over Tibet in 1951, ordinary Tibetans have often felt under attack. To exert control, Beijing destroyed monasteries and at one point banned religion.
In recent years, Beijing has focused on spurring economic development to tie Tibet more closely to China. That effort has drawn criticism from some Tibetans and their supporters abroad, who claim that Tibet’s rich spiritual culture is being diluted.
Many visitors are awed by Tibetan culture, saying it’s “more holy” than the rest of China.
“When you go to the Potala Palace and Jokhang Temple, there are a lot more pilgrims praying and that type of thing, whereas when we went to the temples in China, it was a lot more obvious it was just a tourist attraction,” said Carmen Elmasry, who is from Toronto.
Gyaltso said Tibetan culture needed to be protected, but did not seem to be worried about it ever being wiped out.
“Our culture is Buddhism. Tibetans are all loyal to Buddhism. There is nothing else. It will never be broken, it will always be here,” he said.
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