Word: choephel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Growing up in the Tibetan refugee settlement of Mundgod in southern India, Ngawang Choephel was enthralled by the music of the land he had left behind. He had fled in 1968, when his mother Sonam Dekyi carried the two-year-old Choephel on her back through the Himalayas to India, and he found that traditional music was just about the only link he had to home. As a teen, he made a dranyan (a six-stringed lute) from a gourd and fishing line and taught himself to play. In 1992, after graduating from the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts...
...when Choephel returned to Tibet, things began to go wrong. Barely a month after he arrived in August 1995 to begin making a documentary on music and dance, he was detained by the Chinese government and held incommunicado. No official announcement of his status was made until December 1996, when state radio reported that a closed court had found him guilty and handed down a sentence of 18 years, one of the longest ever given to a Tibetan political prisoner. Says a Tibetan academic living in Beijing: "[The Chinese] assume that being a Fulbright means you're working...