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Rebirth of the lama kingdom

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2011-05-23 10:36

GREAT CHANGES

Archeological findings reveal that there were human activities on the Tibet plateau millions of years ago. Buddhism found its way into Tibet and gradually became popular in the region in the 7th century. The number of lamas ballooned to an unbelievable extent in the 18th century, accounting for 54.8 percent of the total Tibetan population. Study shows that before the liberation in 1951, there was one monk out of every five Tibetan males. Buddhism was flourishing at the cost of a low birth rate and poor productivity. Serious scholars are convinced that old Tibet was not the heaven-like Shangrila that many Westerners imagined. Living Buddha Demo had been a witness. During his time living in a cave in the suburbs of Lhasa in 1925, he lent a helping hand to a Nepalese, and was given a camera in return. By the time of his death in 1973, the living Buddha had taken thousands of photos, though only about 300 negatives survived. On them, well-dressed aristocratic ladies and coolies in ragged clothes stood in sharp contrast, and the Potala was surrounded by ramshackle huts, infertile land and dirt roads crowded with beggars.

"Lhasa has experienced its greatest changes since the 1950s," said his son, Wangchuk Dorje, who followed his father into photography. Lhasa in his lens is a modern city with four-lane cement roads, neat Tibetan-style homes, fast cars and smiling faces of residents who seem happy and content, wearing custom-tailored Tibetan robes or stylish North Face and Columbia jackets. One noticeable change is the increase of population. Austrian author and mountaineer Heinrich Harrer said in his book "Seven Years in Tibet" that 1.2 million Tibetans lost their lives following the PLA arrival in 1951. Figures provided by the Tibetan government at the time, however, indicated the entire population was less than 1 million.

By 1959, the year the central government launched democratic reforms, Tibet's population had increased to 1.23 million. Latest figures published after the sixth national census, however, showed Tibet's population has topped 3 million, at least 90 percent of whom are native Tibetans. Tibet's population growth, averaging 1.4 percent annually, was much faster than China's national average growth of 0.57 percent, according to the regional government. This might at least be attributed to the improved medical care and social welfare. Tibetans' average life expectancy has risen to the current 67 years from 35.5 years in the 1950s. Also, the maternal mortality rate has dropped from 50 deaths per 1,000 live births in the early 1950s to 1.75 per 1,000, while the infant mortality rate has dropped from 430 deaths per 1,000 births to 20.69 per 1,000. Health officials in Tibet attributed the decline in deaths to better medical care and births in hospitals. Starting in 1999, a joint project was launched by the local government and the United Nations Children s Fund (UNICEF) to encourage Tibetan women to give births at hospital, since they used to cut themselves off from the world from the time of their pregnancy through their delivery. Under this program, a new mother who gives birth in a hospital now receives a 30-yuan subsidy for herself and 20 yuan for her caregiver, and her medical bills are paid for. Though the 14th Dalai Lama claimed, in a speech delivered in 2009, that China had brought "untold suffering and destruction" to the Tibetans who "literally experienced hell on earth," German tourist Kristen Odnun, at the end of her first trip to Tibet last month, was convinced the Tibetans were happy. "People here are even friendlier than I expected. They love smiling. Even if they're not talking to you, they'll smile at you. I get a feeling that, from the bottom of their heart, they are happy," Odnun said. Trinley Dondrup, the young serf who was secretly delighted at the PLA's arrival, remembers with fondness how the PLA soldiers magically turned waste land into cropland and built the region's first roads, schools and hospitals. The democratic reform starting in 1959 brought even larger changes, putting an end to feudal serfdom and emancipating more than 1 million slaves.