Word: potala
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...into a formidable course of monastic studies. By the age of six he was choosing his own regent, and by the time he was 11 he was weathering a civil uprising. The Dalai Lama has written with typical warmth about his unworldly boyhood in the cold, dark, thousand-room Potala Palace, playing games with the palace sweepers, rigging up a hand-cranked projector on which he could watch Tarzan movies and Henry V, and clobbering his only real playmate--his immediate elder brother Lobsang Samten--serene in the knowledge that no one would readily punish a boy regarded...
...world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great forces of the day--exile, global travel and, especially, the mass media; and a man from a culture known as the "Forbidden Kingdom" now faces machine guns on the one hand and Chinese discos around the Potala Palace on the other. While Tibet is eroded in its homeland, it threatens to be commodified--or turned into an exotic accessory--abroad...
...Tibet, he explains later, Losar used to be conducted on the roof of the 13-story Potala Palace, with cookies laid out for the masses. "Every year I used to be really worried when the people rushed to grab the cookies. First, that the old building would collapse, and second, that someone would fall over the edge. Now" -- the rich baritone breaks into a hearty chuckle -- "now things are much calmer...
...patron god. Two years later, after passing an elaborate battery of tests, the little boy was taken amid a caravan of hundreds into the capital of Lhasa, "Home of the Gods." There he had to live alone with his immediate elder brother in the cavernous, 1,000-chamber Potala Palace and undertake an 18-year course in metaphysics. By the age of seven, he was receiving envoys from President Franklin Roosevelt and leading prayers before 20,000 watchful monks; yet he remained a thoroughly normal little boy who loved to whiz around the holy compound in a pedal...
Grazing Camels. The basic tactic of China's border policy is the massive settlement of its Han people among the native inhabitants. In Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, the 120,000 Chinese cadres are much in evidence, and the exiled Dalai Lama's Potala Palace is no more than a well-tended cultural relic. Urumchi, the capital of the Sinkiang Uighur autonomous region, has grown from 80,000 people in 1949 to 800,000 today, of whom 60% are Han, only 40% the traditional nomadic peoples-Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Mongols...