Tibetan female helicopter pilot shows Lhasa from the sky

[beijingwalker]

Tibetan female helicopter pilot shows Lhasa from the sky

 

[beijingwalker]

Both boys and girls enjoy equal education opportunities, Tibetans enjoy 15 years free education from kingdergarten to high school. Under Dalai lama's rule, girls can barely get any educations and kids were sent to monasteries to become Lamas and nuns at very early age, their whole lives could be wasted turning those prayer wheels.

 

[samsara]

Upon reading this post and the subsequent comment by @beijingwalker on the gender's opportunity I recall that I still keep some good articles from the old days that I have been storing in my computer's HDD over decades... which I am pleased to share with all PDF readers here, after keeping them for so long one by one, one after another...

And I'm fortunate enough that in this life I already had my precious opportunities to visit those Himalayan Buddhist regions when I was still healthy enough to visit the high altitude place [esp. Lhasa over 3,300m and Shigatse]: Tibet Autonomous Region; Bhutan Kingdom; and Sikkim (formerly a Buddhist Kingdom before being taken over by India). Visited those three places plus Nepal, and got the chances to get some personal feeling as well as witnessed the developmental progresses and infrastructures built in those regions really told me the state of progress of each place! No amount of Western lies & deceptions can sway myself from what I already witnessed in those places! Still, I love all the four regions I visited and I wish them all good and peaceful life!

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TIBET

Strong opinions about Tibet are often held in the West, mostly by those who haven't been there and whose knowledge appears gleaned from misguided propaganda in the popular press.

The first adjective that would come to mind about Tibet is 'desolate'. Those who have been in the the far North (beyond the Arctic Circle), or above the tree line in the North American Rocky Mountains or the European Alps, will have some idea of the Tibetan landscape - which is 10,000 feet (3,048 metres) above the tree line.

There is nothing hospitable about the isolated conditions or climate in Tibet. Surely there are people who can see beauty in even the most desolate surroundings, but these brave detached souls would be most unlikely to choose that location for a summer home and certainly wouldn't live there by choice.

In much of the land, the severe climate means that nothing, or almost nothing, can grow. Tibet is a high-altitude desert, with little oxygen, almost no rainfall, and harsh temperatures. Only sparse numbers of the hardiest animals can survive there. No one in Tibet has ever seen a tree or even a bush. They likely have never seen fruit like cherries or peaches and would never have been able to afford them in any case.

The native Tibetans are not dissimilar to the aboriginal natives in North America, though they are for the most part less nomadic and more susceptible to education and societal structure. If we consider the white man's (European style) treatment of the North American native Indians and other aboriginals, it is very much to the benefit of Tibetans that they have not been 'saved' or 'freed' by Westerners.

Westerners appear to have a willful blindness about Tibet - The Shangri-la syndrome. Everyone wants to believe in some mythological, romantic fantasy about Tibet. It doesn't exist and it never did, but the myth seems to grow daily. The Western media impose on our imagination an image of some fabled theocracy where a reincarnated god rules over a peaceful people spinning prayer wheels.

The facts are different. The region has been under China's governance for many centuries, but was largely self-managed up to the 1950s when Mao went in to clean it up. Before that, Tibet was a slave colony, what the Western press euphemistically refers to as a 'feudal system'. It was no such thing. Virtually all the population was owned by the Dalai and other lamas and worked their entire lives without pay. The highest monks often owned 35,000 to 40,000 slaves. The prettiest girls (and boys) were confiscated to the monasteries for sex. Life was brutal and harsh, corrupt and punctuated by civil wars - the last in 1950. Life expectancy was barely 30.

Education was only for the monks because educated peasants are dangerous and expensive. Industry was forbidden because wealth of the population brought independence from religion. Torture was rampant. For anyone who cares to look, the internet is full of photos of the torture rooms at the Potala Palace and all the instruments used for gouging eyes and cutting leg tendons. You can easily find it. It's all there. The Dalai Lama was responsible for managing all of this. For the world to have given him a Nobel Peace Prize was an obscenity.

China has spent countless billions trying to bring Tibet out of the stone age. Education is now almost universal, the $4 billion Qinghai-Tibet railway brings in billions in tourist dollars and finally provides a way to move goods in and out. Tibet's economic rate of growth and standard of living are higher now than in much of the rest of Western China.


The original website was already defunct many years ago (sadly, it's a nice site ), must be accessed through The Wayback Machine - Internet Archive at below:

Tibet Photos (BearCanada) - Archive by WayBack Machine

 

[GeHAC]

CPC brought Tibetan ppl directly out not just from hundreds years of medival theocracy but also Malthus Trap. Without industralization and modernization which can't co-exist with serfdom, tibet population fall into a stagnant since 17th century little ice age. The unification liberation boost tibet population from 1.2m to 3.3m today. This is the ultimate bound that intergrate tibet fully into modern China.

 

[beijingwalker]

This Tibetan girl is a herder's daughter, lowest caste under Dalai Lama's serfdom society, not regarded as a full human.