Word: tibet
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Neither can consumers, who suddenly face an astonishing variety of Tibetan products, mostly from Chinese state-run companies. Last year's new goodies included Tibet Grass brand ginseng-berry juice, a sorghum liquor called Tibet Fragrant Spring and Tibetan Highland barley wine. "Chinese like our drink because of Tibet's mysterious feelings," says Zai Shudong, who bought ads on national TV for his company's sorghum brew. Trendies in Shanghai can shop for Tibetan jewelry at boutiques just off the glitziest commercial street. At the Traditional Tibetan Medicine Hospital in Beijing, director Renwang Ciren spent a recent morning tending...
...satisfied with merely importing Tibetan culture and commerce, Chinese are increasingly making the tourist trek to Tibet itself. The region received roughly zero non-Tibetan visitors at the start of the last century, but last year 420,000 Chinese tourists inhaled its thin air, up almost 50% from two years earlier. That means opportunity to people like Ouyang Xu, a cocky 33-year-old entrepreneur who opened the Himalaya Travel Agency last year, and took 700 Chinese to Tibet in six months. They multiply the impact of the many Chinese who have moved to Tibet in the past decade...
Interest in Tibet comes at a critical time. The Dalai Lama is 65, and it's unclear if anyone can unite the fractured community of Tibetan exiles after he dies. The identity of Tibet's second-highest religious figure, the Panchen Lama, is disputed. The Communist Party is promoting one 10-year-old boy and detaining the Dalai Lama's choice, making him the world's youngest religious prisoner. Next in the ranks, the Karmapa, is 15 and stunned Beijing last year by trekking through the Himalayas to India, where he warned that "Tibetan religious traditions and culture now face...
Photographs in the main hall at the Labrang Monastery convey Tibet's plight: of five portraits on display, the Dalai Lama is exiled, three others are dead or their identities disputed, and the last, Labrang's abbot, is barred from living with his monks. The local party committee hung a sign calling the spiritual place "a center for patriotic study." Even so, Labrang teems with 2,000 monks and many pilgrims, who are often Chinese. "Older monks feel differently, but I didn't go through the Cultural Revolution, so I welcome them," says a monk too young to remember China...
...practiced. Recently, he says, "we hosted an initiation ceremony for 17 Chinese." A senior lama in Beijing says self-organized student groups from the city's leading schools began seeking him out two years ago to ask religious questions. The lama concedes that nearly all Chinese believe that Tibet is part of China, but says: "More are starting to support not independence for Tibet, but greater autonomy...