Word: potala
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...blogs for information on the goings-on in Tibet. "It's the internet that has been of most use to us," he says. "We try everything, from Google to Chinese tourist blogs," he says, "Sometimes tourists might reveal, say, how many troops they saw during a visit to Potala Palace. Sometimes Chinese news reports unwittingly let out details such as how China has handled protests." But Chinese authorities have been policing the Net heavily since the protests last March, and many blogs and sites have been blocked. One of the casualties has been www.tibetcult.com, a website officially sanctioned...
...settlement I first saw in 1985 into an Eastern Las Vegas, with a population of 300,000 (two out of every three of them Chinese). On the main streets alone, by one Western scholar's count, there are 238 dance halls and karaoke parlors and 658 brothels, and the Potala Palace-for centuries a symbol of a culture whose people were ruled by a monk and home to nine Dalai Lamas-is now mockingly surrounded by an amusement park...
...know it will be gone forever. Already Lhasa is at least six times more populous than when the Dalai Lama knew it, and covers an area 20 times larger than the one square mile of old. A replica of a 40-meter-high mountain stands across from the Potala Palace, and the blue-glass shopping centers around Friendship Street, Happiness Street and Liberation Street would not look out of place in Las Vegas. The few traditional Tibetan buildings still left standing are like an artificially renovated "Old Town" in the middle of a modern metropolis...
...traditions. As a result, my nonsectarian spirit is much, much stronger. And accordingly I can make a small contribution to religious harmony. I am a rare religious person who has a lot of genuine friends in other traditions. So I feel that if I stayed inside Tibet, in the Potala [Palace] looking around with binoculars, I may [have missed that]. And because I became a refugee, I became more realistic. Our generation is facing a serious challenge. Therefore, in a way, we have the best opportunity to show our inner strength. You can't say this is white or this...
After my three years of wandering, I finally reached Tibet and hoped that there, at last, I would find the answers to all my unspoken questions. But when I arrived in Lhasa and came face-to-face with the Potala, I stopped dead. I couldn't go in, because I knew that when I came out again there would be nowhere left...